Psychedelic music visualization

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Psychedelic music visualizations (also known as "Liquid Light Shows") were an important part of psychedelic music and art, and were used in the 1960s and 1970s mainly in America and England by bands such as Jefferson Airplane or Pink Floyd to enhance live performance .

Emergence

From the mid-1960s a new artist movement emerged on the west coast of the USA, which was shaped by the open and at that time still legal use of drugs such as LSD. To the same extent that the influence of psychedelic drugs prompted musicians, who had hitherto been mainly involved in folk music, to experiment with new sounds and structures, numerous artists, graphic artists and filmmakers were encouraged to interpret these new visual impressions. (see also psychedelic art ) In the field of stage technology, attempts were made to simulate the visual effects of a drug intoxication in order to enable a new, holistic musical experience in harmony with the music.

techniques

Oil projector

Some new stage and lighting technologies were developed explicitly for use in psychedelic light shows and are still considered to be the style of the psychedelic era.

The best known are so-called "Liquid Oil" projections. You could build this type of projector yourself without great technical or financial effort. A simple overhead projector usually served as the basis. Two flat glass bowls were placed one inside the other. Watch glasses that had been stolen from large station clocks were very popular. An emulsion of colored oils was filled between the two glass plates. This mixture was moved through the warmth like a lava lamp, with colorful, constantly changing bubbles and bubbling drops dancing to the rhythm of the music. The oil projections were mostly thrown onto a large screen behind the stage. At large events there were often several light artists who operated up to 70 projectors at the same time. For this reason, many rock concerts took place in former theaters (such as the legendary Fillmore East ) because only there was enough space behind the stage to control the elaborate projections.

Kaleidoscope projection

Another technical innovation was represented by kaleidoscope projectors, which could throw continuously flowing images in all colors and sizes onto the stage.

There are also some new lighting technologies, such as the use of stroboscopes , UV light , brilliant color filters or rotating prismatic attachments for headlights that reflect and refract the light (comparable to the cover of the Pink Floyd record " The Dark Side of the Moon " ).

Artist

Among the numerous light artists of that time, some stood out in particular.

The Joshua Light Show is a New York light artist collective founded by Joshua White in 1967. On the east coast, the group was not at the epicenter of the psychedelic movement, but they quickly made a name for themselves with their light shows, which they did as part of the “San Francisco Summer of Love” tour for bands like The Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane organized. In 1968 the Fillmore East Theater opened in New York (an offshoot of Fillmore West in San Francisco) and director Bill Graham hired Joshua White to lead all lighting and video effects. In the following two years White was to have a decisive influence on the aesthetics of psychedelic music visualization. Many of the relevant bands of that era performed at the Fillmore East and were supported by the Joshua Light Show with huge rear projections of oil lamps, strobes and slides. White was characterized above all by his versatility: While many light artists only let one endless oil projection run for a whole gig, White worked with a variety of motifs and effects and was therefore able to (thanks to enormous technical effort) the audience with an abundance entertained by impressions and visions. In 1970 Joshua White left Fillmore East and shortly afterwards developed Joshua Television, a color television enlargement system that enabled large format (live) video images for mass events. Then White made a name for himself as an independent light and video artist. The Joshua Light Show still exists today (with a partially changed line-up) and is on tour with a combination of old projection and new digital technology. Joshua White's film “Liquid Loops” (1969) counts to this day as a standard work on oil lamp projection.

Joshua White's mentor was Glenn McKay from New York . McKay came to San Francisco at the beginning of the psychedelic era, where he says he "experimented extensively with psychoactive drugs." During one of Ken Kesey's legendary “acid tests” he saw a light show for the first time and decided to make it his profession. McKay's group “Headlights” initially worked mainly for Jefferson Airplane, at whose concerts they lit almost all the shows for over 3 years. McKay was best known for his huge and very complex shows, with which he was even allowed to perform in the Whitney Museum in New York. McKay says about his work: "I'm providing a new door to the consciousness of sound and color to be so in touch with the emotion and the rhythm of the experience losing any sense of separation between the color, moving images and the sound"

A vibrant psychedelic scene also established itself in England. However, Londoners dared to take a more avant-garde approach to psychedelic rock. Pink Floyd in particular kept developing and experimenting with new tones and effects. The same applies to their lighting technician Mike Leonard . Leonard was a professor of architecture at Hornsey College of Arts when some members of Pink Floyd were studying there. Together with the band, he manufactured specially developed devices to realize a completely new type of music visualization. His method was to send light through geometrically arranged glass tubes and lenses in order to be able to create an endless variety of patterns and surfaces. His style was more graphic, with concrete shapes instead of chaotic patterns. His work is strongly reminiscent of Oskar Fischinger . The band's famous concerts in London's UFO Club seemed more like an art performance than a rock concert. Leonard was even a member of the band as a keyboardist at times. After three collaborations, however, the band looked for new lighting technicians in order to develop further.

Andy Warhol's "The Exploding Plastic Inevitable" was undoubtedly a turning point in music visualization at the end of the 1960s . Warhol, who had been experimenting with the medium of film since 1963, developed this show especially for his protégés The Velvet Underground and Nico. "The Exploding Plastic Inevitable" represents a radical alternative to the "groovy" light shows on the west coast. Rather, the audience experienced a radical, dark multimedia happening. Stroboscopes, mirror balls and slide projectors threw the stage in a blazing light. Four film projectors simultaneously threw images over the band, the motifs of which were often disturbing or repulsive. There were also strange live performances such as sadomasochistic whip shows. The tour seemed more like a kind of grotesque traveling circus and many a LSD disciple who attended the concert in anticipation of a consciousness-expanding light show suddenly found himself on a horror trip that had become real. Nonetheless, the show was very well received, especially in the East Coast artist scene. Warhol explicitly used certain motifs for certain songs and was therefore the first to react to the content of a song with his pictures. He developed what he called a “total environment” in which music, art and film were combined and for the first time specifically used the medium of film as a narrative element for stage shows.

various

A well-known adaptation of psychedelic music visualizations is the color sequence from Stanley Kubrick's " 2001: A Space Odyssey " (1968). This scene was realized by Douglas Trumbull in a newly developed process called "Slit-scan photography". Trumbull was considered a pioneer of computer-aided special effects and was already working in the 1960s with devices that he built himself from old armored visors. Pink Floyd also refer to the film: The piece "Echoes" from the record "Meddle" is coordinated with this film scene.

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