With the controls having been set firmly for the heart of the city’s Baltic Triangle, the third Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia launches into orbit. And for thirty six hours, Camp and Furnace – a huge converted warehouse straight out of Merseyside’s illustrious, industrial past – is a seething mass of cosmic humanity celebrating this art form as it continues to enjoy a massive cultural resurgence.
There is visual art, including Dan Tombs’ installation built around the transportive concept of circuit bending and a further interpretation of the Liverpudlian post-punk band CLINIC’s Production Line art installation whereby live musical feeds are taken from the festival public/performance spaces and then mixed and streamed to the audience. There is cinema, including a screening of the Italian Dario Argento’s hallucinatory horror Suspiria. And on Saturday afternoon there is a spoken word programme, all of which take place in the Gallery above Blade Factory, the third of the event’s performance spaces.
But lying at the very heart of psychedelia’s place in popular culture – ever since it’s San Fransiscan Haight-Ashbury awakening in the mid to late 1960s – is music. And from early afternoon on Friday until the very small hours of Sunday morning, with barely a pause for breath let alone sleep, it arrives. Wave after mesmerising wave of psychedelic sound – from the psychotropic spaghetti Western melodies of Spindrift to the woozy psychedelic blues of their fellow Americans Sleepy Sun, and from the ear-shredding incessancy of Bristol’s Anthroprophh to the more reflective freak-folk of Boston’s Quilt – every possible variant of the musical genre is explored.
Friday’s impressive centrepiece comes courtesy of the futuristic independent record label and home of all things dreamy, reverby and ethereal, Sonic Cathedral as they celebrate the launch of their brand new EP ‘Psych For Sore Eyes 2’ EP by introducing Spectres, The Vacant Lots, The Early Years and Younghusband onto the Camp stage.
The Vacant Lots – Jared Artaud (vocals, guitars, drone) and Brian MacFadyen (drums, vocals, electronics) – draw upon the punk spirit of another American synth-and-voice duo, Suicide, as they merge their dense, throbbing, hypnotic pulse with some of the more frayed layers of The Brian Jonestown Massacre. The results are exhilarating.
On the other side of the wall in Furnace, Wolf People may live in a musical past but they impress with a truly post-psychedelic sound that builds bridges between Cream’s Disraeli Gears, progressive rock and freak-folk. Later on in the same venue, the Allah-Las accompany their set with footage of an endless, existential road trip across Arizona which is projected onto the venue’s multi-screens. Much like the Los Angeles quartet’s psychedelic pop, though, the journey never quite seems to reach an end.
France’s Sudden Death Of Stars show that there is life after The Incredible String Band and the distorted malevolence of The Janitors from Stockholm in Sweden also affirms that the Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia’s reach is global. Nearer to home, FatCat Records’ Mazes‘ set has a much greater urgency and vigour than it had earlier in the week in York, but Saturday afternoon belongs to their fellow label-mates TRAAMS. With the motorik rhythm switch firmly in the on position these three men of Chichester just go from strength to strength with a compact set that oozes fluidity and danceability in spades.
Daniel O’Sullivan and Alexander Tucker are Grumbling Fur and together they bring new meaning to the term stoned immaculate. They charm the Saturday night crowd in Furnace with their almost child-like wonderment and a fistful of very good psychedelic-pop tunes. They open with the quivering, quasi-techno beat of ‘Protogenesis’ from their second long player Glynnaestra; latest single ‘All The Rays’ brings to mind the more deconstructed elements of Brian Eno’s Before And After Science album; though the biggest cheer of the evening is reserved for ‘The Ballad Of Roy Batty’ which deftly replaces Blade Runner’s dystopian vision with a simple yet ethereal reassurance.
Earlier the Lay Llamas – the duo of Nicola Giunta and Gioele Valenti supplemented here by Matteo Pin on guitar, William Zancan on drums and Gianluca Herbertson on synthesisers – continue with their spiritual, psychedelic expedition that takes them way beyond the confines of their Sicilian borders, while later in the evening the Swedish three-piece Hills set the fuzzed-out scene for their fellow countrymen and women, the faceless collective that is Goat who close out the festival in a suitable whirl of psyched out, astral splendour.
Embracing the central characteristics of mind-expansion that lie at the very core of psychedelic counter-culture, the Liverpool International Festival Of Psychedelia continues to grow. For two days and nights it sticks resolutely to the principles of non-conventional tradition by not only presenting some of the very best out-there neo-psychedelic music around today but also doing so in what is a very relaxed, friendly, safe and inclusive environment.
Additional reporting from Anastasia Connor, whose interviews at the festival with Grumbling Fur and The Vacant Lots will appear on these pages presently.
Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia was held on 26th and 27th September 2014 at Camp and Furnace, 67 Greenland St, Liverpool, Merseyside L1 0BY.
More photos from the festival can be seen here
