Tag: psychedelic

Skeppet

skeppetToday a package from the Not Not Fun label arrived with some excellent new stuff (as mostly is the case with this label)… both for my own pleasure and hopefully yours… as some copies will be up in the webshop soon…

Next to a 12″ by the ever amazing Umberto there was the latest LP by tropical wave / weird pop / psych pop musician Maria Minerva… but the best record in the box was by Skeppet…

Skeppet is a Swedish psychedelic outfit which first came to my attention with the split album they did with Street Drinkers on the now defunct label Release The Bats… this split album is all kinds of awesome… both sides but especially the Skeppet side…

I was really looking forward to more music from this duo and the new album entitled “Phase 3” is simply superb… so the waiting was worth it for sure… Skeppet play a soft, sweet, light sounding, soothing kind of psychedelic music… it is playful and trippy… it sounds a lot like classic 60’s acid rock stuff in many ways… possibly like Country Joe And The Fish in their most psychedelic mood… the music is sunny and would have fitted perfectly in the 60’s hippie scene in the USA… think Haight Ashbury on a nice sunny afternoon… a bit of dozing off in the sun or shade with some drinks or anything else… simply perfect… I am getting in the mood for the first days of spring for sure with Skeppet spinning on the turntable here…

Below is the 8 minute edit of the over 20 minutes piece on the A side of the record… enjoy!

Rockumentaries

doemaarFrom time to time I like to watch documentaries about pop and rock music… in the past I saw a really good one on Nico and more recently there was a very nice one on gabber / hardcore…

This weekend I saw two… one on Dutch band Doe Maar… an 80’s band which played reggae inspired pop music… in a very short period of time they became the biggest thing in Holland… the best thing about this documentary were the very open conversations with the band members reflecting on the past… they pictured the two driving musicians and they themselves told about their difference views on music and the band… it was nice to see how they still got along very well after all these years… without being frustrated or being in a fight as you often hear in such cases…

The other thing was something I never realised… they became very popular with a very young audience… teens and even younger… this frustrated them as they made serious music and were no boy band as we know boy bands today, created especially for such a specific young audience and to make some cash…

The band told this was also the reason they split up… that they did not find that their music reached the people it was meant for and did not come across as intended… funny detail is that I used to listen to this band a lot… when I was very young… when I was about 7 years old…

imihendrixAnother documentary I saw was on Jimi Hendrix… a musician I never liked before… I have never bought any of his music… even though I am a big fan of 60’s music… it never triggered me or made sense to me… the documentary was great with lots of old footage and some friends of him still alive telling about him…

The footage from Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 is legendary and I knew some of the images but never saw it this way before… his performance was amazing… how he played the guitar and how the whole performance was turned into a ritual with as climax setting the guitar on fire and summoning the fire to rise…

And… surprisingly I liked quite a lot of the music of Jimi Hendrix which was featured on the documentary and I will get into this soon to see if I like his work better now as in the past…