psychedelic and avant-garde music from the 1960s to the present
psychedelic and avant-garde music from the 1960s to the present
psychedelic and avant-garde music from the 1960s to the present
psychedelic and avant-garde music from the 1960s to the present
psychedelic and avant-garde music from the 1960s to the present
psychedelic and avant-garde music from the 1960s to the present
psychedelic and avant-garde music from the 1960s to the present
psychedelic and avant-garde music from the 1960s to the present
psychedelic and avant-garde music from the 1960s to the present
psychedelic and avant-garde music from the 1960s to the present
psychedelic and avant-garde music from the 1960s to the present

Resources

Radio


House of Sound

Portland-based internet radio station that is home to The Space Program

WFMU

Freeform radio station based in Jersey City, New Jersey. Your host used to work two blocks away at an insurance company. The best radio station in the country, if not the world.

XRAY FM

Portland's own freeform station.

KUGS

The original home of the Space Program, Western Washington University's own KUGS.


Record Stores


Stranded Records

The store that subsumed the late, great, much-lamented Aquarius Records, which was arguably the greatest record store in the world when it existed. Stranded is a pretty good store in its own right, but there's no replacing AQ.

Jackpot Records

Portland-based record label and shop (sadly down to one location at this point) with a bias toward the heavy and/or strange.

Little Axe Records

One of the best record stores in Portland, an offshoot of Mississippi Records, and conveniently located next to the Hollywood, the best theater in Portland.


Labels


Rocket Recordings

UK-based label home to GOAT, Gnod, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, Flowers Must Die, Hey Colossus, Housewives, Kuro, and a bunch of other bands I've played on my show. One of the few labels from which I feel comfortable, sound unheard (if sight unseen is an idiom then "sound unheard" can be one too), purchasing anything they release.

Not Not Fun

L.A.-based (hey, some decent stuff comes from there) label probably more responsible than anyone for the renewed interest, in recent years, in synth-based music from the late-70s-early-90s (that used to be tarred with the label "new age") thanks to their devotion to releasing (mostly on cassette, appropriately enough) contemporary bands inspired by the sounds of that era.

El Paraiso Records

The second greatest export of Denmark, after LEGO. Home to Radar Men From the Moon, Causa Sui, and Papir, among others. Has maybe the greatest, most consistent design aesthetic, as far as packaging and merch go, of any label since Factory Records in the 1980s.


Festivals


Levitation

Long-running psychedelic music festival occurring annually every spring outside of Austin, Texas (though they've had some... issues in recent years). Now has satellite festivals in Vancouver, BC, and Chicago, Illinois.

Liverpool Psych Fest

The biggest psychedelic music festival in the UK. Even if you can't go, the lineup is worth perusing, as it's typically a yearly who's who of psych from around the globe.


Review Sites / Blogs


Head Heritage

Julian Cope's guide to modern psychedelic music. Sadly not kept up as well as it was a decade ago, but you have to figure he's writing the sequel to Krautrocksampler and Japrocksampler. Swederocksampler? Italorocksampler?

The Wire

The Rolling Stone of weird music.

The Quietus

UK-based music website that's a little like Pitchfork, but written by people who aren't either 20-something interns who have never discovered a band not recommended to them by Spotify or middle-aged men who desperately wish they were that LCD Soundsystem dude. They also have a pretty decent periodically-appearing psych music column.

Psych Insight Music

Insightfully written reviews of psychedelic music. It is what it says it is.

Dayz of Purple and Orange

Psychedelic music blog that actually gets people to send it records and has periodic guest posts by psychedelic music celebrities like Dave W from White Hills. So, you, know, about as big-time as an old-school, one-person-run blog can hope to be these days.

Miscellaneous


The Krautrocksampler List

Frequently referenced on the show, this list of fifty seminal Krautrock albums comes from Julian Cope's 1994 book Krautrocksampler that played a big part in kickstarting the resurgence of interest in that genre during the 90s. It's by no means comprehensive, I think owing to the fact that a number of the omissions (e.g. A.R. & Machines, German Oak) are albums that were, at the time, long out of print, and would only be repressed subsequent to its publishing.

The Japrocksampler List

Another list frequently referenced on the show, taken from Julian Cope's 2007 follow-up to Krautrocksampler, the similarly-offensively-named Japrocksampler. This list is a bit greater in scope than the Krautrocksampler one, since the record industry (and MP3 bloggers - sadly no more, for the most part) had sort of beaten him to the punch, as far as a renewed interest in 60s/70s Japanese avant-garde music was concerned, and reissued (or posted online) a good number of the albums from that era, even bizarre one-offs like Karuna Khyal and Brast Burn.

The Nurse With Wound List

Not brought up on the show a lot, but the original "obscure band list", included with the first Nurse With Wound album, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella, released all the way back in 1979 (yeah, there were already that many obscure bands then). The list of bands on the Space Program front page is an homage to this list, containing - as the NWW list does - exactly 291 entries (and including a few fake bands, as Steven Stapleton has admitted the NWW list contains as well)