World Psychedelia returns to the airwaves

I am back on the airwaves with a regular show on the online station X-Raydio, playing all range of music (including plenty of the artists featured on this blog). Once shows have aired they are all posted below, give them a listen & support indy radio: https://www.xraydio.net/category/shows/arrun-degenhardts-show/

Mexico

Mexican psychedelia is a rabbit hole that goes deep. With exposure to sounds from across all parts of the Americas and beyond, psych emanating from Mexico caters for a spectrum of moods and tastes, and ties in deeply with political liberation struggles that took place throughout the later half of the 20th century. Carlos Santana […]

Benin and Togo

The shared musical influences of Benin and Togo makes for another joint post. Analogue Africa give a good rundown of the shared traditions – “the music of Benin and Togo was influenced by a few main musical currents: Cuban, Congolese and local traditional music, as well as Chanson Francaise. Additionally, the geographical location of Benin […]

Nigeria

Nigerian psychedelic rock is a goldmine of incredible music, tied-up deeply in the country’s history. The bands sampled here give a good taste of some of the sounds that came out of the afrorock and highlife scenes in the mid to late 70’s, for a good piece going over the history of this music see […]

Psychedelic sounds from the Sahara

In this post rather than focusing on a specific country or continent, the sounds of the Saharan desert are explored. Much of what is sampled comes from the nomadic Tuareg people’s, playing Assouf music, or as it has come to be known in the west, desert blues. Tinariwen (Mali) Starting with the most well-known of […]

Chile

Whilst there was a lot to draw from in previous posts covering Brazil and Peru, Chile has the most flourishing psychedelia scene in Latin America today, with a whole array of groups focused mainly in Santiago putting it on the map as one of the homes of the psych renaissance. As such most of the […]

Perú

Continuing the Latin theme from the previous post on Brazil, this post goes deep into the world of Peruvian psychedelia. There is an incredible amount of musical output to explore here, Peru has perhaps the richest tradition of psychedelic music of any country sampled in this blog so far, and as ever this post is […]

Brazil

This blog had previously covered Latin American psychedelia, but as stated in that post it was only scratching the surface. Here we scratch a little further off the surface, looking at psychedelia from Brazil (with some crossover from the aforementioned Latin America post). Tropicalia, bossa nova, samba rock, Latin funk and garage rock all find […]

India

Ravi Shankar No description necessary. Watch him introduce Western audiences to raga music at Monterrey Pop Festival, 1967, below. (Watch out for Hendrix in the audience). Atomic Fire From a review: “The mysterious bass player Keith Kanga, and an incarnation of the Atomic Forest ensemble he formed with vocalist Madhukar Chandra Das, lead guitarist Neil […]

Turkey and Iran

Turkey Zafer Dilek According to a review: “Zafer Dilek is one of the unsung heroes of Turkish music having worked as arranger, producer and guitarist for countless famous Turkish artists, usually uncredited.” Recording mainly in the mid 70’s often for film soundtracks, his work is predominantly instrumental fusing traditional Turkish folk sounds with psychedelia. Listen […]