Baxters Psychedelia

Baxters is an ongoing series of playlists aiming to offer a look at the psychedelic scene worldwide. For the guidelines, see what was written in the introduction to the 2020 edition.

The tracks

With a name taken from a drug commonly used in the Middle East, and an album whose title is both a tribute to Yemeni singer Faisal Alawi (who died in 2010) and a statement of intent to give the compositions within it the same dignity as classical music, Israel's El Khat offer up a psychedelia that looks back to the roots of their leader, Eyal el Wahab: “I tried to keep the structure simple. It's a bit like pop music, where the soul lies in four strings and a melody. The difference is in the expression.” Djaja, the first single taken from the album, sings notes of alienation, with lyrics that read “From Yemen and beyond America, we are together and I am alone.”

Track: Romantique

Formed in 2018, Switzerland's Mount Kōya made their mark especially in 2019 with Rei, an album recorded live in the church of Sainte-Claire in Vevey, their hometown, and for a collective musical approach that has led the ensemble to collaborate both in the studio and live with local musicians, at times swelling to as many as fifteen members. “Romantique” is a post-Covid single, part of the soundtrack to a film currently in production. The lyrics draw on the psychedelic tradition of the 60s, steeped in carnal love and spiritual introspection, and a desire to break free from dogma and sexual identity to live one's life without barriers.

The band is currently working on Teien, their fourth album.

Track: Les Rois

Another track recorded during lockdown, "Les Rois" is the result of a collaboration between pop singer-songwriter Kacimi and Lionel Limiñana, the male half of one of the most beloved French psych bands of recent years (Limiñanas, of course). The result is a magnificent ride that nods to Neu!, steeped in a variety of effects including reverse guitar and electronic sax. The duo also recorded another track together, "Visions", closer to psychedelic garage.

Track: Desert Warp

The Germans in Grombira are proudly old-school, so much so that they take pride in pointing out that the sessions behind their album "Desert Warp" took place in 2020 but sound like 1972. The title track stems from frontman Ralph Nebl's experiences on a trip to Marrakech, where he was struck by the local musicians. It's no coincidence that the band's self-declared genre is oriental space rock.

Track: Nebniw el Ghad f dlam

We stay (more or less) in Morocco. Produced by Peter Gabriel's Real World, the French-Moroccan duo Taxi Kebab makes its debut with an EP, "Visions al 2ard", which drops psychedelia into a techno context, where the voice of Leïla Jiqqir recalls her roots (the lyrics are indeed in Moroccan Arabic), while the instrumentation, tamed by the male half of the group, Romain Henry, unleashes electronic pulses and Eastern sensuality, above all thanks to the use of the buzuq (a stringed instrument from the Arab tradition).

Brano: In The Void

On their eleventh album, Norway's Rancho Relaxo, veterans of Nordic psychedelia, continue to delight the palates of their fans. According to the band, "Spirit Of Ecstasy" is a clearer album in terms of mixing, but one of the most eccentric in terms of experimentation. "In The Void", the track that closes the record, is a hypnotic, dark raga rock piece, with "a stripped-down instrumentation, which allowed us to be really good on a sonic level".

Track: Dulce Amargo

One of the most interesting names in contemporary South American psychedelia, Mexico's Tajak have reached, on their fourth outing, a turning point. First of all, "La Sombra Del Aqua" is their first album to be sung entirely in Spanish; furthermore, the recording process was far slower and more meticulous than in previous efforts, which used to be completed in no more than two days. Even more unusual, the album was not recorded in a studio, but outdoors, on the banks of the Pixquiac river. Post-production took weeks, with the addition of various instruments such as ocarina, sitar, thunder drum and flute, as well as tape effects.

The result, magically embodied by "Dulce Amargo", is a corpus of seven songs that – to borrow the band's own words – begin with solid structures before being dismantled and fused into a soundscape of fractal sounds dancing between the spatial and the earthly.

Track: Abbès Saladi

Declared a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2019, gnawa music is the sonic tradition of the ethnic group of the same name, primarily linked to ceremonies and rituals that end up creating a hypnotic atmosphere for musicians and spectators alike. The Kadef Abgi project came about by chance, when Devin Waldman, a New York saxophonist who has played with legends of the calibre of Thurston Moore, Patti Smith and Lydia Lunch, heard an otherworldly, mesmerising voice coming from a venue in Montreal. Once the performance was over, Waldman asked the singer, Ziad Qoulaii, if he'd be available to play together. In no time the two put together a group (with a particularly important role played by Anas Jellouf, who plays the sintir and qrabeb, two instruments typical of gnawa music), leading to improvised sessions with no compositions or preset ideas, and no second takes. Waldman then edited and mixed everything. "Abbès Saladi" is the longest track on the album and perfectly embodies its sound, with Qoulaii leading a trance that moves from tradition into the future.

Track: Dres an Menydh

In Cornish, "Donsya a'n Loryow" means "dance of the moons", while "Dres an Menydh" means "beyond the hill". Painter (hers is the beautiful cover art) and musician Daisy Rickman gathered songs recorded at home between 2020 and 2021 to create an album that ties into the psychedelic folk tradition, where fingerpicking and voice weave dreamlike laments, in a constant search for a bond between body and soul.

Track: Lúa vermella

A magical record, the second by Moura, ranging from Iberian folk to stoner, by way of space rock. "Axexan, Espreitan" is a journey into Galician tradition, made of memories and customs, in a work that, in literary or cinematic terms, would be labelled folk-horror. "Lúa vermella" is the track that closes the album, split between a more properly folk opening before exploding into a liberating stoner invocation, as if bringing the characters of the beautiful artwork back to life.

Brano: Interpreters Of Forest

Champions of Japanese kraut (forgive the juxtaposition) and flagship act of Guruguru Brain, on their third album Minami Deutsch carry on undeterred with a psychedelia not too interested in exploring new possibilities, focusing instead on riding familiar ground, both for them and for their fans. "Interpreters Of Forest" is, however - together with the closing "The Border" - an oddity within "Fortune Goodies", momentarily setting aside the band's typical motorik frenzy to bask in an almost unexpected folk tenderness.

Track: Experimental & Professional

After guiltily overlooking him two years ago with the splendid "First Flight" (proof that trying to capture the present can only be a futile exercise, with no way of avoiding looking ridiculous if one dares to claim to be a source of truth), we now give proper due to one of the best contemporary psych guitarists. Compared to the aforementioned previous record, on "Evolution Here We Come" Chris Forsyth sets aside lysergic mysticism to let loose in a mix of kraut, jam and alternative, enlisting trusted friends such as Dave Harrington, Douglas McCombs of Tortoise and Tom Malach of Garcia Peoples. "Experimental & Professional" is a driving motorik track boasting a truly stellar guest star, namely Marshall Allen, longtime right-hand man of Sun Ra and leader of the Arkestra since 1995. At almost 100 years old (he was born in 1924), he still hasn't stopped exploring the cosmos!

Track: Invader Summer

Another act on the Guruguru Brain roster, Dhidalah have embraced the noisiest strand of Japanese psychedelia since 2013. With "Sensoria" the band attempted to give their own answer to the question of whether space lies within our brains or beyond planet Earth. "Invader Summer" was written by guitarist Ikuma Kawabe, who over six minutes roams around an energetic riff and tightly condensed jam-style improvisations.

Track: Sea

Led by multi-instrumentalist Matyáš Adámek, Prague's Island Mint deliver a psychedelic pop shot through with shoegaze tones. Recorded in 2021, "Irreality" is - says the band's leader - "a mosaic of feelings and dreams that I recorded over the past two years without any deep intention behind it. I tried to turn disparity into a virtue, to find a way to glue all the songs together. I picture it as a dreamlike landscape you walk through without knowing what story awaits at the next step". These stated intentions take their best shape on the closing track, "Sea", which over almost seven minutes moves from an opening section that looks to "Loveless" and British psychedelic 60s sounds, to a second part in which the sound truly disperses into the sea, beneath an evocative spoken word passage. The band returned in October with the EP "All Studium No Punctum".

Track: Yağmur Yağar Taş Üstüne

The debut by Şatellites lays down another stone in the contemporary Anatolian scene (even though the band is actually from Haifa). It's a varied record, where – to borrow the description from the album's Bandcamp page – "the band set out to weave together disparate elements such as funk groove, disco rhythm and psychedelic reverb with traditional Middle Eastern rhythm and structure, opening up the richness of Turkish music to the Western world, so that anyone and everyone can connect with something on the album."

"Yağmur Yağar Taş Üstüne" ("Rain Falls on Stone") opens as a delicate, dreamlike folk tune carried by singer Yuli Shafriri's voice and Itamar Kluger's guitar (who this year also launched a side-project called Eje Eje), before picking up pace and evolving into a rock sound that's both majestic and catchy.

Track: El Verdugo

A genuine outsider of the psychedelic scene (the writer is basically his only paying supporter on Bandcamp, his social media presence is nearly non-existent, and information about him is scarce at best), Chilean artist Alejandro Safari León Coneja, aka Alienander, is a potential standout of the genre. On his second solo effort, Tigrero Versus Perceval cements Coneja's crooked brand of psychedelia, which here feels perhaps less murky but richer than on his debut, "Cadavreverb".

Talking about the record, Coneja says that "stories of decadent and glorious characters from the past convey the feeling with which these songs were written. My intention was simply to carry out an exercise in re-imagination based on the emotions and authentic images that certain historical periods and their corresponding fictions stir up in me. Beyond the playful spirit in which this music was written and performed (as if I were a drunken medieval monk trying to make psychedelia with the occasional touch of acid western), I like to think there's an attribute of honesty in it. The elements are sometimes premeditated, other times whimsical and improvised; the recordings were made at home and sporadically. It's a jumble of tastes and ideas held together by an interpretive framework. There's no unifying concept, but there are nods between songs, and a couple of them are even part of the same made-up saga."

"El Verdugo", the opening track, "tells the story of the different points of view among the torturers, the executioners and the tortured/executed of a vague tale".

Track: Detached

Chinese psychedelia keeps proving itself among the liveliest, most violent and distinctive on the global scene (so much so that there's no unanimous agreement on whether their records even belong to the psych genre). The self-titled Solid Liqui album also draws on an abrasive, unhinged brand of post-punk, so much so that several have called it no wave. "Detached" is the longest track on the record, unleashing a barrage of epileptic drumming and hallucinated female choruses.

Track: How To Be A Better Person

The Dublin-based Dunning-Kruger Effect take their name from – quoting Wikipedia – a cognitive bias in which inexperienced, poorly skilled individuals in a given field tend to overestimate their own abilities, wrongly judging themselves above average. Everyone can draw their own conclusions. "How To Be A Better Person" pays homage to minimalist electronic music, especially Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk. Maybe it's self-deprecating irony about overrating themselves, but the music holds up.

Track: Paraligo

Three years after a debut whose complexity and allure earned it the nickname of the "Tago Mago" of the 2010s, the Athens-based Dury Dava have returned with a leaner, more direct second album — less mesmerizing, but more effective at grabbing mainstream attention. The quintet worked on the record's seven songs between 2019 and 2021, and the constraints of the lockdown period inevitably left their mark, mostly on the lyrics, according to the band. On "Paraligo", an oriental melody is carried forward in an increasingly obsessive, imperious way, underscoring the desolation in singer Dimitris Kouloglou's voice: “Significato e scopo/ L’ho quasi trovato ma non ci sono riuscito/ Ancora una volta”.

Track: Kötüye Bişey Olmaz

Lalalar are probably the next big thing of the entire contemporary Anatolian scene, having already landed in Italy at Turin's Jazz Is Dead. Having made a name for themselves in recent years through a handful of singles and live performances, the band arrived at the release of their debut album, "Bi Cinnete Bakar", with a privilege that's exceedingly rare these days, especially in the indie world: real anticipation, with all eyes on them.

Musically, they can be "explained" through the artists they themselves cite as most important: on one side two legendary names of Turkish tradition, namely Neşet Ertaş and Moğollar, on the other Rage Against The Machine and Depeche Mode. "Kötüye Bişey Olmaz" ("Nothing Bad Can Happen") fuses these two poles: you don't often hear psychedelia this exotic and danceable at once.

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