I readily admit my ignorance around the term psychedelia. As is perhaps the case for many, for me the term was firmly entrenched in its clichés and (sub)cultural baggage: connotations of 1960s art, fashion, and music, and the vibes of hippies and flower power. My encounter with Jonathan Weinel’s Explosions in the Mind: Composing Psychedelic Sounds and Visualisations changed that dramatically. Through its own mind-expanding approach, at once dreamily yet lucidly combining artistic practice with comprehensive research, Weinel’s innovative work takes us on a wholly new journey. It’s a trip through which our understandings of psychedelia not only flourish into an invigorating analytical vocabulary for our multimodal and synesthetic experiences with audio, but along the way, psychedelia becomes a creative and ludic methodology of interest to (ludo)musicologists, audiovisual artists, and musicians alike.
Accommodating reader accessibility, Explosions in the Mind begins by defining its key terminology through captivating narration. Conjuring...
University of California Press