Cluster, "Im Süden"/ The United States of America, "Hard Coming Love"

Third post of three about how much I love psychedelic music, and still I haven’t gathered the nerve to try to define what I’m talking about. One reason for the delay is that for all my claimed enthusiasm for this music, I have exactly zero experience with psychotropic substances. Or as I put it in a Mixtape Diaries episode: eating 47 hush puppies and listening to Sigur Rós is the closest I’ve ever come to a psychedelic experience. None of this means I’m disqualified from listening to or enjoying any of the music. I’m just putting that fact on the table now as a kind of disclaimer, toward inoculating myself against criticism before it comes.

Subject, then, to the caveat that I’m relying entirely on at best secondhand information, so I probably don’t know anything … but hold on: isn’t it true that the vast majority—probably 99.999%—of what we know or understand to be true is discerned from some source other than our own personal perceptions?

I’m gonna say what I’m gonna say. If you have other, better ideas, slot them in the comments.

I suppose that psychedelic music comes in two varieties: psychedelic-in-fact and psychedelic by association.

The first category includes music that was written either to document, approximate, or augment a psychedelic experience. It would be easy enough just to say you know this type of music when you hear it. But if I’m going to aim higher and try to define what psych-in-fact music is, or sounds like, as opposed to what it intends, then the most useful touchpoint I can muster is Edmund Burke’s critical monograph, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1757. Now of course you’re asking: What could an eighteenth-century Tory statesman possibly have to say about psych rock? Bear with me, because this is as philosophical as I am likely to get in any of these posts. Survive this, and the entire Substack is your oyster.

The system of aesthetics Burke constructs in his treatise is predicated on his placement of the sublime and the beautiful as concepts in opposition. And sensible aesthetician that he is, Burke defines these qualities with reference to their effects—passions is the word he uses—on those who perceive them:

The passions which belong to self-preservation, turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances … Whatever excites this delight, I call sublime.

[B]eauty … is a name I shall apply to all such qualities in things as induce a sense of affection and tenderness, or some other passion the most nearly resembling these.

The sublime and the beautiful, Burke continues, are indeed ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure, and however they may vary afterwards from the direct nature of their causes, yet these causes keep up an eternal distinction between them, a distinction never to be forgotten by any whose business it is to affect the passions.

We could benefit from some comparative description here, and to that end Burke submits the following:

On closing this general view of beauty, it naturally occurs, that we should compare it with the sublime; and in this comparison there appears a remarkable contrast. For sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small; beauty should be smooth and polished; the great, rugged and negligent; beauty should shun the right line, yet deviate from it insensibly; the great in many cases loves the right line, and when it deviates, it often makes a strong deviation; beauty should not be obscure; the great ought to be dark and gloomy; beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought to be solid, and even massive.

Got all that? Much as Burke argues that to the rational mind, the sublime and the beautiful are distinct phenomena that cannot coinhabit the same experience—or that at least engender unique and incompatible feelings—it seems to me that what makes a psychedelic experience is a collapse of this aesthetically essential¹ polarity. Put differently, a psychedelic experience is characterized by a collision, confluence, or conflation of what under ordinary conditions we would recognize as the sublime and the beautiful. This is a necessarily speculative suggestion, coming from me. And reductive, too, in that it suggests a single characteristic to define the universe of psychedelicism. But let’s run with it for a minute and see where it takes us.

Reports back from psychotropic journeys often recount the subject’s placement at the edge of Infinity—or his absorption into it for some period of time. The subject describes feelings of warmth, affinity, and inclusion. Love, even, Burke would submit. Now it could be that all the drug does is present the user with a representation of the sublime orders of magnitude greater than, say, Edmund Burke was ever going to find in his rambles around Central London in the 1750s. I mean, geez: he never even saw the Grand Canyon. It could be that the chemically-enhanced sublime functions exactly as it should, and the subject’s response is a proportionately greater terror-delight than is available down here on Earth. But it seems to me that the tenor of what gets reported back to Mission Control after splashdown—that proverbial, if not now clichéd, Oneness with the Universe—describes an upwelling not of Burkean delight so much as of that love and warmth that is engendered by the beautiful.

The flipside is the bad trip, where familiar and proximate sights and sounds, such as would ordinarily induce a sense of affection and tenderness, take on alien characteristics and distorted dimensions. What should be in view becomes obscured; confined spaces lose their shape; lines turn to curves; and static objects come to life. The septum between Infinity and The Here and Now is breached, and vast yawning cosmoses erupt from the fruit bowl on your kitchen table or within the pastoral painting on your burbling wall. If that weren’t enough, the boundaries of your senses break down, so that colors bleed into sound and vice versa. In short, the sublime elbows its way into the room, folds itself in on beautiful things, and turns them terrible indeed.

If we try on this definition for psychedelic and it fits at least as well as the sweater I’m presently wearing—i.e., it ain’t great, and the signified could stand to lose a few pounds—then we’ve got at least something to go on here, as a matter of first principles. Otherwise there’s nothing for it but to cut you all loose to play the million songs I’ve linked here and in the last two posts, so you can identify for yourselves what common essential ingredient(s) makes them psychedelic-in-fact. And even if you were up for that, I’d have sent you on a fool’s errand, because thus far I haven’t done anything to call out which of the songs are in this first in-fact category, as opposed to psych-by-association.

So let me provide an example or two of recordings that strive to approximate acid trips and at least in some limited way are convincing. The trick here is for the music to lean into at least some of the qualities Burke associates with the sublime—vastness, obscurity, power, privation, magnificence—while at the same time hitting one or more traditional beauty buttons through the use of tone, melody, harmony. Lyrics can be useful for these purposes, too. Sung or spoken lines can communicate peace, contentment, or love, which Burke defines as that satisfaction which arises to the mind upon contemplating anything beautiful … or they can convey awe, confusion, or outright dissolution of self. All that is required to make music psychedelic-in-fact is that elements of both the sublime and beautiful are rendered together. How much or how little of each go in the mix is immaterial, as is the question whether the sublime and beautiful elements should coexist in acrimony or harmony. But these variables do contribute to the vast range of possibilities that artists have explored over the years.

As a result, the psych-in-fact category can accommodate all manner of wild ideas, including, for example, the concepts featured in the eponymous recordings on Brainticket’s 1971 debut album, Cottonwoodhill. “Brainticket Part 1” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Brainticket Part 2” (Apple Music, Spotify) consist of a single 4/4 hook-and-riff repetition, reiterated over 25 minutes while the studio engineer knob-twiddles found sounds into the mix, and vocalist Dawn Muir live-blogs her trip like some Pythian priestess, cryptic and effusive:

The shadow of a spring day, reflecting deceit. A face! A mind! People parked. An army of thoughts retreating towards oblivion. A square of light, a circle of thought, a triangle of NOTHING.

As hard as Brainticket try (and they really are trying too hard²), the effect on the listener isn’t quite Pentecostal, or indicative of Dawning madness. But simply by juxtaposition, Muir’s breathless articulations impart a pulse-quickening significance to ordinary incidents of life like glass breaking, tooth brushing, gargling, a passing fire truck, and the audience’s applause.

Floating in the ether, galaxies away from Dawn Muir and Brainticket, are Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized. For four decades now, and at the considerable expense of his nervous system and overall health, Jason Pierce has been exploiting chemical aids in pursuit of fleeting moments of peace, tranquility, and fulfillment. Songs like Spacemen 3’s “Transparent Radiation” (Apple Music, Spotify) and Spiritualized’s “Lay Back in the Sun” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “I Think I’m in Love” (Apple Music, Spotify) document certain of these precious found moments and the drug trips that brought them. Three different songs with three very different vibes, but each one is subsumed in its own shimmering, reverberant psychedelic soundscape, because that’s Jason Pierce for you.

Having dialed things down a bit, let’s ramp them up again. Any of the absolute rockers on Guru Guru’s UFO record—for these purposes we’ll call out “Stone In” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Girl Call” (Apple Music, Spotify)—would qualify as psychedelic-in-fact. Strip the blues and familiar rock structures out of Black Sabbath, overload the mix with distortion and delay, and what you get is Guru Guru. These vast, sprawling songs (if indeed you can call them songs) are charged with such all-swallowing beauty, it’s as if Mani, Uli, and Ax are pouring plasma into the universe and filling it to the brim.

Space-rock forms like Tangerine Dream’s “Journey Through a Burning Brain” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Fly and Collision of Comas Sola” (Apple Music, Spotify) fit the bill here, too, along with any number of early Pink Floyd tracks that I’m seeing my way to enjoying, decades after slagging them off. Let’s name-drop “A Saucerful of Secrets” (Apple Music, Spotify) as penance and move on. Studio tricks help render a sense of cosmological distance on these records, but then again, consider what the MC5 pull off with “Starship” (Apple Music, Spotify). Played live on Kick Out the Jams, it charts much the same course as these others, slashing up through the atmosphere and solar system into deep space and reporting back staticky signals. You just have to listen harder to hear the effects.

So much for psych-in-fact. By contrast, the psych by association category sits one remove from the psychedelic experience and will capture within its sweep (1) music made by (or for) people on hallucinogenic drugs who aren’t effectively communicating (or receiving) anything substantive about the trip, or (2) music that features established, often tired tropes associated with psychedelia.

It was never the case that psychedelic music required the use of calliopes and Hammond and Farfisa organs, wah-wah pedals and sitars. Or that its signature imagery, as reported on album covers or band logos or in song lyrics or the larger themes of concept albums, had to consist of Hindu avatars, the Mad Hatter and White Rabbit, Mr. Kite, the Lizard King, Blue Meanies, skeletons in top hats, or multi-colored marching bears. And finally, psychotropic drugs don’t uniformly drive their users to compile wardrobes of tie-dyed shirts, raspberry berets, Nehru jackets, or suede fringe. Nor do they condemn them to afternoons playing hacky sack or doing that dumb thing with the three sticks.

Individual persons introduced or appropriated these characters into psychedelic culture. They adopted their own styles and embraced particular aspects of spirituality or expression. And individual actors selected these instruments, refined their sounds, and declared them psychedelic. In each case these folks acted on cultural cues and impressions that uniquely affected them. All of the sounds, styles, and icons listed above are known proxies and tropes associated with psychedelia and passed down through the years, simply because particular people with particular ideas and references became famous and influential enough to define the canon per their own specifications.

The way I’m talking about psych by association might suggest I find all this stuff to be derivative, won on something other than the merits, and played-out. And to the extent I’m still carrying baggage from the bygone days of scorning Freedom Rock and fake smile on your brother sentiment, TSA inspectors working the imaging belt would indeed find a whole lot of this paisley dreck on their screen.

That said, records on this side of the psych divide have their merits, too. Who could quibble with “White Rabbit” (Apple Music, Spotify), or for that matter Jefferson Airplane’s gorgeous and profound “Embryonic Journey” (Apple Music, Spotify)? And Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” (Apple Music, Spotify)—my God. The Pretty Things’ S.F. Sorrow record isn’t faultless, but where it hits? Wow. “Old Man Going” (Apple Music, Spotify) flat rawks, and opening track “S.F. Sorrow Is Born” (Apple Music, Spotify) is what turned my head to this band in the first place.

Probably the best example of psych-by-association worked to perfection is Os Mutantes’ opening statement, “Panis et Circenses.” But I’ve already written a standalone post for that one.

High time now I named my Songs of the Week. I’ve picked one from each category. My in-fact song is “Im Süden” (Apple Music, Spotify) by Cluster. As far as I’m concerned, this 13-minute proto-electronic opus is Krautrock’s crown jewel—and for that matter the pinnacle of psychedelic-in-fact music. The backbone of the track is a four-note guitar pattern and a two-note bass pulse, repeated over and over and over, like the thrum of an engine. The pattern and pulse rise and fall in volume and are subjected to a range of distortive effects. Over time, other instrumental tracks surface, rise in prominence, and recede, as if you’re passing through weather. Squalls and storms of gas, dust, and radiation build to the point of overload, then dissipate.

The description I’m giving here is useless. Useless. “Im Süden” is something you have to hear—and hear loud—to understand and appreciate. Last Thursday Kate and I drove out to Lila’s school in the evening to see her Dance Project performance. I have never been an audiophile, in that I’m not especially interested in the quality of the sound coming from my speakers or the acoustics of a room. I’d rather spend my money on records than on equipment. That said, it turns out that the sound system in the dance studio at Lila’s school is pretty terrific, and as Lila and her team uncoiled their dance moves to (excellent choice) the Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!” (Apple Music, Spotify), it occurred to me that I would love to reserve that dance studio for an hour some night, lie on the floor in the dark and play my music, loud, over the house speakers.

And the first song I would pick to play in that moment, if I could leverage our tuition payments to access it, would be “Im Süden.” There is no question about it. This song, in the dark, over sleep headphones in my bed, already lifts me into a transcendent state. And now it has me craving, if not yet chasing, new and better ways to lose myself in it. This record was recorded in 1972. Moebius and Roedelius had organs, a guitar, tone generators, and oscillators—that is, parts of synthesizers to use to make these sounds. To be sure, they also had Conny Plank on the sound board, which will help a bit, too (see “Your Time Will Come”). But even so: stunning.

My psych-by-association song is “Hard Coming Love” (Apple Music, Spotify) by the United States of America. The USA were formed in Los Angeles by UCLA ethnomusicology student Joseph Byrd and his girlfriend Dorothy Moskowitz. Cluster and the USofA have in common ties with the Fluxus avant-garde art movement: Byrd performed in concerts organized by Yoko Ono in New York in the early 1960s, and Conrad Schnitzler, a student of Fluxus bannerman Joseph Beuys, was an early bandmate of Moebius and Roedelius before leaving the group (then called Kluster with a K) for Tangerine Dream.

The United States of America’s self-titled 1968 record is the only album the band released. Parts of it are irritating. Byrd the Music Student imposes upon the mix at every turn, and Byrd the Band Member wasn’t especially disciplined about assessing when these impositions were benign. As a result, The United States of America often reads like a Catalog of Traditional American Musical Forms (1776–1968), indexing ragtime and honky-tonk and marching bands, among other bygone sounds. All these styles are integrated deftly enough into the compositions on the record; it’s just the result isn’t always to my taste. I’ll accept a little calliope in my ’60s music, and from time to time a bit of slide whistle. But where Os Mutantes always seem to know where my line is—and never to cross it—now and again the USofA go blundering into trouble.

But enough complaining: where the United States of America can do no wrong is on forward-looking tracks like “Hard Coming Love,” “Coming Down” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (Apple Music, Spotify). The base layer of these songs is the standard psych-rock sound of the time: squalling guitars, heavy organs, and what I’ll call panther bass. All this adds up to a 30%-better Jefferson Airplane, which is nothing to sneeze at. But then they fire up their ring modulators, oscillators, and synths—electronics nobody was using in rock in 1968—and the songs rocket off into the stratosphere. Best of these three is the bluesy-as-hell “Hard Coming Love,” where the USofA deliver a paint-peeling psych jam, Moskowitz steps in with vocals every bit as good as Grace Slick’s, and the electronics dance across the track like spiders.

I’ve been following this river for going on 35 years now. Slashing through the vines and brush with my machete, deflecting arrows from the natives, delirious with fever as I push deeper and deeper toward The Source. If the long, strange trip ended today, and Cluster and the USofA were as far and as deep as I went, I couldn’t complain about that result. These won’t be the last psychedelic songs logged in this Substack, I expect. But for now, as the culmination of this three-part series, they will certainly do.

1. To Burke—and to me, too, because I’m convinced.

2. Cottonwoodhill’s jacket notes read as follows: Listen to this first record of this LSD/ Hashish/ Fixy/ Jointy Sound. Take a trip to your inner light. See the hallucinations of reality rise out of the groove. you’ve got your brainticket now! Hallelujah!