Album Guide To Global Psych
by Sarah Bardeen
The advent of psychedelic rock in the 1960s let off a kind of DayGlo miasma that wafted around the globe, leaving electric keyboards and wah-wah peddles in its wake. The recipients (in Asia, Africa, Eastern and Western Europe, South America) initially imitated what they heard coming out of the U.S. and U.K. -- those oh-so-painful/oh-so-amazing covers -- but it wasn't long before they were making mutations, sending taproots into the fertile musical soil of their home countries to come up with entirely new sounds. Hence chicha, cumbia's hallucinatory cousin. Hence Afro-rock, which took funk and, impossibly, made it funkier. Hence tropicalia, which fed hash to samba, bossa nova and maracatu. The list of lysergic-damaged musical movements goes on.
Psych music was, and still is, a profoundly strange musical development, one which is fundamentally anti-commercial despite its commercial successes: at its most extreme, it eschews the three-minute pop song, verse-chorus-verse song structure and, in some cases, listenability. In the hands of Amazonian Indians, or deranged Frenchmen, or acid-damaged Brazilians, it took on whole new dimensions. Decades later, it's easy to view the international spread of psychedelic music as cute, or an oddity. But in reality the music meant so much more: both at its birthplace and around the world, it provided the aural soundtrack for a generation that was experimenting not only with drugs, but with throwing out social orders they disagreed with. It was a sonic refusal of the status quo, a way for youth to assert their modernity and individuality at home, while participating in an international culture abroad. Maybe that sounds quaint, but it mattered at the time -- and perhaps it still does matter.
Perhaps most importantly, it made for some crazily compelling music.
In many countries, the political context soon overwhelmed these shining bursts of sound. The Plastic People of the Universe, formed just after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, saw its members harassed by police for years and finally arrested in 1976 and sentenced to jail terms. The coup that killed Salvador Allende in Chile also choked youth culture. In 1970s Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge regime murdered a huge number of musicians who'd embraced and emulated western pop. Iran's 1979 revolution shut down most western-leaning pop music and banned all women -- including superstar icon Googoosh -- from performing in public. For every flower, there's a reaper. In some instances, the music you'll hear may not sound that revolutionary -- but for some artists, simply choosing to plug in an electric guitar made them cultural outcasts.
Unfortunately, the vagaries of international licensing mean we don't have all the most important artists from this era -- Plastic People of the Universe, we salute you! -- but even so, we've got a lot to offer. A number of collections below bring to light bands that even the most avid collectors haven't heard of, whether they're West African or Peruvian. There are cult icons and artists who should be cult icons. But perhaps most importantly, this music is seriously fun. Wild. Worth hearing, as often as your headphones can take it.
Jean-Pierre Massiera "Psychoses Freakoid"
No set of descriptors can quite prepare a listener for Jean-Pierre Masseira. The French surf-rock musician-turned-composer/producer/engineer started out playing with surf outfit Les Milords in the early 1960s; by the end of the decade, he was performing startling feats of audio trickery on a stable full of misfit musicians -- and creating apoplectic psych with his own outfit, Les Maledictus Sound. <I>Psychoses</i> tracks his clattering triumphs, in all their proggy/Funkadelic/proto-industrial/pre-hip-hop glory: yes, he sets audio clips of Hitler to triumphant soul horns, and he does indeed transform a drunken Italian and a crowing rooster into a "song." -- SB
VA "Nigeria Rock Special: Psychedelic Afro-Rock & Fuzz Funk In 1970s Nigeria"
The third in Soundway Records' revelatory "Nigeria Special" series, this album owes its existence to Herculean feats of crate digging by label founder Miles Cleret. Even devoted collectors of West African music were stunned by the track listing -- many hadn't heard of half of these bands -- though not by the quality of the songs, which reveal a musical culture that had absorbed James Brown and the Meters by osmosis and was now mutating its way down a glorious, fuzz-distorted path. Trance-inducing traditional African music met -- and liked -- improvisatory weirdness and thick grooves, and we're all richer for it. -- SB
Juaneco y Su Combo "Masters of Chicha Vol. 1"
All right, are you ready for this one? This band of Mestizos fronted by three generations of a Chinese-Peruvian family dresses up like the Shipibo Indians from their Amazonian hometown to play chicha, a genre popular in the Peruvian highlands in the 1960s that was fueled by Colombian cumbia, Brazilian carimbo, surf rock and local hallucinogens, and recently enjoyed a revival courtesy of a French Brooklynite. Sound like a heady brew? It oughtta: chicha was named after a corn liquor, and the effervescent, blissed-out sounds on this seminal band's retrospective will leave you feeling good. - Rachel Devitt
VA "Dengue Fever Presents: Electric Cambodia"
Los Angeles-based Dengue Fever have been preparing the ground for a Cambodian pop renaissance for years now, and finally they invite us to sample the fruits of Cambodia's 1960s music scene before it was annihilated (literally) by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. The songs are pulled from cassettes the band collected over the years, and information is scanty: In many cases they relied on Cambodian friends to identify song titles and artists. But you don't need to know anything to rock out to these songs, which sound freaky and otherworldly -- and that's before the psychedelic effects kick in. Imagine Gidget, suddenly washed up on the shores of Southeast Asia. -- SB
Os Mutantes "Os Mutantes"
Brazil's military regime went after many of Os Mutantes' contemporaries, but they never really touched these acid-damaged kids (and we're serious about the acid damage) because they just didn't understand what Rita Lee and the Baptista brothers were doing. "Os Mutantes" is a straight-up Psychedelic rock masterpiece that sent waves rippling through Brazilian popular music. The mutant's self-titled 1968 debut careens crazily through styles, with gentle astral songs ("O Religio") giving way to Beatles-crazed rave-ups ("Bat Macumba," "A Minha Menina"). The sheer playfulness and diversity of this release is astonishing. A must-have. -- SB
Los Jaivas "Palomita Blanca"
"Palomita Blanca" was actually Los Jaivas' soundtrack for a 1973 film directed by Raul Ruiz and based on a book by Chilean author (and Mexican pop star Natalia Lafourcade's uncle) Enrique Lafourcade. Los Jaivas, a rock band with a taste for avant garde improvisation and Andean folk music, were an excellent choice for a film that portrayed Chilean youth culture at the dawn of the '70s. But before the film could release, the military coup happened, and Chile's experiment with democracy came to a bloody close. Both film and album gathered dust for decades, only surfacing in the 1990s. The whole album is engaging, but incidental music like the 13-minute "Piedra Roja" or "Disuacion" gives you an idea of just how deliciously out there this band could get. -- SB
VA "Pomegranates"
Psychedelic sitar, '60s sex kittens, funk freakouts...not exactly what you think of when you think of Iran. But this is the country many knew before the 1979 revolution: secular, proud of its ancient heritage yet eager to embrace the youth culture rising in the west. There are so many gems here, but Zia's bizarro funk is a big score, as is Googoosh's great hit "Talagh." -- SB
VA "Digger's Delight: 10 International Psychedelic Freakouts"
Less a complete survey than a whirlwind tour of psychedelic music's strange journey to distant lands, Digger's Delight means to whet your appetite, not satiate it. The finds are here: Musica Dispersa's "Hanillo" (from Spain) sweetly places flowers in your headphones and drifts off with a beatific smile; Germany's Gift, on the other hand, shreds them with sludgy guitar and epic drums. And Mogollar, a pioneering Turkish rock band, manages to look east and west simultaneously: those melodies are traditional; their instrumental treatment is not. -- SB
VA “World Psychedelic Classics: Love's A Real Thing”
James Brown was big in Cameroon? Hendrix was hot in Senegal? Everyone knows the '60s were a period of explosive musical creativity in the U.S., but you might not know that funk, soul and rock spilled into Africa too, creating dozens of incredible bands that would have fit Detroit as easily as Dakar. -- SB
The advent of psychedelic rock in the 1960s let off a kind of DayGlo miasma that wafted around the globe, leaving electric keyboards and wah-wah peddles in its wake. The recipients (in Asia, Africa, Eastern and Western Europe, South America) initially imitated what they heard coming out of the U.S. and U.K. -- those oh-so-painful/oh-so-amazing covers -- but it wasn't long before they were making mutations, sending taproots into the fertile musical soil of their home countries to come up with entirely new sounds. Hence chicha, cumbia's hallucinatory cousin. Hence Afro-rock, which took funk and, impossibly, made it funkier. Hence tropicalia, which fed hash to samba, bossa nova and maracatu. The list of lysergic-damaged musical movements goes on.
Psych music was, and still is, a profoundly strange musical development, one which is fundamentally anti-commercial despite its commercial successes: at its most extreme, it eschews the three-minute pop song, verse-chorus-verse song structure and, in some cases, listenability. In the hands of Amazonian Indians, or deranged Frenchmen, or acid-damaged Brazilians, it took on whole new dimensions. Decades later, it's easy to view the international spread of psychedelic music as cute, or an oddity. But in reality the music meant so much more: both at its birthplace and around the world, it provided the aural soundtrack for a generation that was experimenting not only with drugs, but with throwing out social orders they disagreed with. It was a sonic refusal of the status quo, a way for youth to assert their modernity and individuality at home, while participating in an international culture abroad. Maybe that sounds quaint, but it mattered at the time -- and perhaps it still does matter.
Perhaps most importantly, it made for some crazily compelling music.
In many countries, the political context soon overwhelmed these shining bursts of sound. The Plastic People of the Universe, formed just after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, saw its members harassed by police for years and finally arrested in 1976 and sentenced to jail terms. The coup that killed Salvador Allende in Chile also choked youth culture. In 1970s Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge regime murdered a huge number of musicians who'd embraced and emulated western pop. Iran's 1979 revolution shut down most western-leaning pop music and banned all women -- including superstar icon Googoosh -- from performing in public. For every flower, there's a reaper. In some instances, the music you'll hear may not sound that revolutionary -- but for some artists, simply choosing to plug in an electric guitar made them cultural outcasts.
Unfortunately, the vagaries of international licensing mean we don't have all the most important artists from this era -- Plastic People of the Universe, we salute you! -- but even so, we've got a lot to offer. A number of collections below bring to light bands that even the most avid collectors haven't heard of, whether they're West African or Peruvian. There are cult icons and artists who should be cult icons. But perhaps most importantly, this music is seriously fun. Wild. Worth hearing, as often as your headphones can take it.
Jean-Pierre Massiera "Psychoses Freakoid"
No set of descriptors can quite prepare a listener for Jean-Pierre Masseira. The French surf-rock musician-turned-composer/producer/engineer started out playing with surf outfit Les Milords in the early 1960s; by the end of the decade, he was performing startling feats of audio trickery on a stable full of misfit musicians -- and creating apoplectic psych with his own outfit, Les Maledictus Sound. <I>Psychoses</i> tracks his clattering triumphs, in all their proggy/Funkadelic/proto-industrial/pre-hip-hop glory: yes, he sets audio clips of Hitler to triumphant soul horns, and he does indeed transform a drunken Italian and a crowing rooster into a "song." -- SB
VA "Nigeria Rock Special: Psychedelic Afro-Rock & Fuzz Funk In 1970s Nigeria"
The third in Soundway Records' revelatory "Nigeria Special" series, this album owes its existence to Herculean feats of crate digging by label founder Miles Cleret. Even devoted collectors of West African music were stunned by the track listing -- many hadn't heard of half of these bands -- though not by the quality of the songs, which reveal a musical culture that had absorbed James Brown and the Meters by osmosis and was now mutating its way down a glorious, fuzz-distorted path. Trance-inducing traditional African music met -- and liked -- improvisatory weirdness and thick grooves, and we're all richer for it. -- SB
Juaneco y Su Combo "Masters of Chicha Vol. 1"
All right, are you ready for this one? This band of Mestizos fronted by three generations of a Chinese-Peruvian family dresses up like the Shipibo Indians from their Amazonian hometown to play chicha, a genre popular in the Peruvian highlands in the 1960s that was fueled by Colombian cumbia, Brazilian carimbo, surf rock and local hallucinogens, and recently enjoyed a revival courtesy of a French Brooklynite. Sound like a heady brew? It oughtta: chicha was named after a corn liquor, and the effervescent, blissed-out sounds on this seminal band's retrospective will leave you feeling good. - Rachel Devitt
VA "Dengue Fever Presents: Electric Cambodia"
Los Angeles-based Dengue Fever have been preparing the ground for a Cambodian pop renaissance for years now, and finally they invite us to sample the fruits of Cambodia's 1960s music scene before it was annihilated (literally) by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. The songs are pulled from cassettes the band collected over the years, and information is scanty: In many cases they relied on Cambodian friends to identify song titles and artists. But you don't need to know anything to rock out to these songs, which sound freaky and otherworldly -- and that's before the psychedelic effects kick in. Imagine Gidget, suddenly washed up on the shores of Southeast Asia. -- SB
Os Mutantes "Os Mutantes"
Brazil's military regime went after many of Os Mutantes' contemporaries, but they never really touched these acid-damaged kids (and we're serious about the acid damage) because they just didn't understand what Rita Lee and the Baptista brothers were doing. "Os Mutantes" is a straight-up Psychedelic rock masterpiece that sent waves rippling through Brazilian popular music. The mutant's self-titled 1968 debut careens crazily through styles, with gentle astral songs ("O Religio") giving way to Beatles-crazed rave-ups ("Bat Macumba," "A Minha Menina"). The sheer playfulness and diversity of this release is astonishing. A must-have. -- SB
Los Jaivas "Palomita Blanca"
"Palomita Blanca" was actually Los Jaivas' soundtrack for a 1973 film directed by Raul Ruiz and based on a book by Chilean author (and Mexican pop star Natalia Lafourcade's uncle) Enrique Lafourcade. Los Jaivas, a rock band with a taste for avant garde improvisation and Andean folk music, were an excellent choice for a film that portrayed Chilean youth culture at the dawn of the '70s. But before the film could release, the military coup happened, and Chile's experiment with democracy came to a bloody close. Both film and album gathered dust for decades, only surfacing in the 1990s. The whole album is engaging, but incidental music like the 13-minute "Piedra Roja" or "Disuacion" gives you an idea of just how deliciously out there this band could get. -- SB
VA "Pomegranates"
Psychedelic sitar, '60s sex kittens, funk freakouts...not exactly what you think of when you think of Iran. But this is the country many knew before the 1979 revolution: secular, proud of its ancient heritage yet eager to embrace the youth culture rising in the west. There are so many gems here, but Zia's bizarro funk is a big score, as is Googoosh's great hit "Talagh." -- SB
VA "Digger's Delight: 10 International Psychedelic Freakouts"
Less a complete survey than a whirlwind tour of psychedelic music's strange journey to distant lands, Digger's Delight means to whet your appetite, not satiate it. The finds are here: Musica Dispersa's "Hanillo" (from Spain) sweetly places flowers in your headphones and drifts off with a beatific smile; Germany's Gift, on the other hand, shreds them with sludgy guitar and epic drums. And Mogollar, a pioneering Turkish rock band, manages to look east and west simultaneously: those melodies are traditional; their instrumental treatment is not. -- SB
VA “World Psychedelic Classics: Love's A Real Thing”
James Brown was big in Cameroon? Hendrix was hot in Senegal? Everyone knows the '60s were a period of explosive musical creativity in the U.S., but you might not know that funk, soul and rock spilled into Africa too, creating dozens of incredible bands that would have fit Detroit as easily as Dakar. -- SB