This post is part of our Psych 101 program, an in-depth, 14-part series that looks at the impact of psychedelia on modern music. Want to sign up to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. Theyll thank you. We thank you.Celebrating pivotal moments in rock history is a congested, clickbait racket these days, but if there’s any one album truly worthy of reverence, it’s the Jimi Hendrix Experiences mighty 1967 debut, Are You Experienced. Seriously—its release was nothing less than a BC/AD kind of event. In addition to articulating an astonishingly new understanding of heaviness, it opened up exotic vistas in feedback, echo, delay, and studio-as-instrument experimentation (legendary reggae producer Dennis Bovell even believes that the brain-liquefying “Third Stone From The Sun” is the first dub track). Indeed, nothing like The Experience had ever existed before—not Cream, not The Who, not The Yardbirds, not Link Wray, not Johnny Burnette and The Rock and Roll Trio.Hendrix’s countless innovations loom over rock’s evolution, but instead of trotting out the same tired mix of mainstream guitar heroes as proof of his profound influence—e.g., Eddie Van Halen, Prince, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Slash, etc.—we’ve opted to honor his sonic radicalism with a playlist charting his sweeping impact on the evolution of out sound: This includes proto-metal, Japanese psychedelia, German experimental rock, jazz fusion, avant-rock, stoner metal, sludge, and beyond. After all, just about any band or artist pushing the limits of maximum distortion and sweaty groove action within a rock, jazz, or blues context owes Hendrix no small debt. This is equally true of late-’60s long-hairs Blue Cheer and MC5, ’70s fusion explorers Miles Davis and The Tony Williams Lifetime, and modern-day noise weirdos Skullflower and Fushitsusha.Prepare to commune with your inner mind, as our playlist is packed with lots of extended freak-out jams and third-eye lysergia. Sonny Sharrock’s nearly 10-minute “Promises Kept,” from his 1991 masterwork Ask The Ages, bursts into a frenzy of amplifier-scorching fire music, but there are also a lot of fist-pumping riff ragers to jam out to: Fu Manchu’s “Mega-Bumpers” is a deliciously fuzzy, funky slab of ’70s spliff rock filtered through shaggy, Dogtown-skater cool.One thing you can be sure of, by the playlist’s end, you’ll be able to answer the question “Are you experienced?” with a big, resounding YES.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Chicago’s underground has been on fire the past few years. Every other week seems to deliver a new batch of releases from the Hausu Mountain label, purveyors of madcap electronics and cyborg-bopping eccentricity. The shadowy Beau Wanzer, whose icy and forlorn productions disintegrate the divide between post-punk and techno, is nearly as prolific—and that’s just one dude. And then there’s Jaime Fennelly’s always progressing Mind Over Mirrors project: his latest album, the critically lauded Undying Color, wanders dense, rippling expanses of pastoral art folk and baroque électronique.Of course, “underground” means a lot of different things to a lot of different heads. For denizens of the city’s thriving avant-garde jazz and hardcore punk scenes, it conjures up a significantly different cluster of artists. So for this playlist, we focus primarily on musicians, bands, and oddball geniuses who stalk the back alleys, linking DIY electronics, industrial, droning experimentation, and mutant dance music. At first blush they may seem too far apart to link, but in Chicago, where musicians from different disciplines have always mingled freely, the overlap between them is substantial.This idea is reflected in the growing catalog of Midwich Productions, a label specializing in “electronic music from the urban wilderness of the Midwest.” Founded by longtime resident and musician Jim Magas, it’s home to both HIDE (pictured at top), who unleash mechanized nightmares that carry forward the city’s electro-industrial tradition, and Alex Barnett, a composer whose quirky, bubbling pieces ooze a cozy sense of nostalgia for ’70s synthesizer music.As you can probably guess, a lot of this music gets awfully weird—Fire-Toolz’s collision of boom-box EDM and grindcore rasp makes zero sense. Yet a good deal of it is deeply beautiful: Quicksails, an alias for multi-instrumentalist Ben Billington, crafts flickering avant-pop that bridges DIY electronics with the city’s deep reverence for jazz and free improv. It’s music that could only come from Chicago.

I don’t have the analytics to prove it, but my gut tells me that not a whole lot of folks outside of gnarly hardcore punks fuck with British label La Vida Es Un Mus. Which is somewhat understandable, seeing as how the scene is something of a subcultural island, one perfectly comfortable with not trying to amass converts. But still, more weird-ears should be tuning to the London-based label, founded back in 1999, as they’ve been unleashing some of the year’s toughest and most engaging records not just in hardcore but across the DIY spectrum. Via a steady stream of releases, the label’s founder, Paco Mus (who it should be noted cares nothing for press attention), has expanded the parameters of hardcore punk to include all manner of underground hybrids. From repressing Aussie post-punks Constant Mongrel’s Living in Excellence—an album packed with suffocating riff-smudge, political unrest, and mutant sax screech—to releasing Spanish band Rata Negra’s Justicia Cósmica, buzzing melodic punk flaked with new wave synth-action.LVEUM are decidedly globally-minded. Of the roughly 20 full-lengths, cassettes, and singles dropped in 2018 (frantic pace, right?) they managed to chronicle thriving underground scenes in Singapore (Sial’s throttling Binasa EP), Australia (Priors’ flailing eponymously titled full-length), and the good, old United Kingdom (Snob’s irrepressibly eccentric self-titled slab). At a time when nationalism and xenophobia rip across the West, LVEUM’s championing of anti-establishment music and grassroots community from around the world doesn’t just feel refreshing but downright necessary. When digging into our playlist you’ll encounter tons of tracks from La Vida Es Un Mus’s 2018 releases, but you’ll also hear a smattering of older stuff (vital reissue-work included) from the imprint’s most beloved bands, like Es, Nailbiter, and the mighty Limp Wrist, who have been pivotal figures in the modern queercore movement. Press play and be prepared to trash shit Paris-style.

As a self-conscious aesthetic, lo-fi didn’t come into its own until after punk’s pro-amateur, DIY attitude had already laid waste to popular notions of what constituted acceptable musicianship and recording techniques. Yet the idea of turning crappy sound into pure sonic gold reaches back to the classic rock era. The obvious precursors are The Velvet Underground and garage-psych bands like 13th Floor Elevators, who in the mid ’60s achieved sonic delirium through intentionally muddy primitivism. Around the same time, the post-Pet Sounds Beach Boys pretty much invented the concept of the warm and woozy bedroom recording, while The Beatles, during their “White Album” sessions, incorporated home demo-style graininess and feedback into their previously pristine pop. The Stones deserve a lot of credit, too. After all, there are entire stretches of 1972’s Exile on Main St. that sound like moldy-ass basement recordings.

On April 10 of this year, Ben McOsker announced that Load Records—after nearly a quarter-century of contorting brains—is closing up shop. To describe the underground rock and noise label’s run as stellar is a gross understatement. Few imprints that document the fringes of sound have released even half the amount of genre-defining albums that McOsker and his partner in crime Laura Mullen have: Lightning Bolt’s Ride the Skies, Sightings’ Absolutes, The USA IS A Monster’s Tasheyana Compost, Yellow Swans’ At All Ends—the list goes on. These aren’t just amazing records, they’re seeds that filtered out into the world and helped spawn a global noise movement that came to a screeching climax in the ’00s. To put Load’s legacy in its proper context, you’d have to reach back to the glory years of Touch and Go or Amphetamine Reptile for an apt comparison—though, truth be told, neither label ever ventured as far out sonically as Load.Founded in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1993, Load served as the primary outlet for the unique mix of local greaser punks and art-school transplants inhabiting the city’s sprawling underground. Lightning Bolt are the most popular of the Providence outfits, but Load also released critical titles from Olneyville Sound System, Thee Hydrogen Terrors, Pleasurehorse, Kites, Prurient, and The Human Beast. McOsker and Mullen also looked far beyond the city’s limits: By the mid-’00s, they were unleashing music from artists as far flung as New York City (Sightings, Excepter, The USA IS A Monster), Ohio (Sword Heaven, Homostupids), San Francisco (Total Shutdown, The Hospitals), and Norway (Noxagt, Ultralyd).Beyond its consistently excellent output, Load pushed the limits of what an independent record label could get away with while continuing to remain commercially viable. Most imprints—however freaky, cacophonous, and anarchic—that get a taste of success tend to begin playing it safe, opting to release records that rarely venture beyond what’s already proven to be popular. But, possessing a deep love for trickster spirit-like unpredictability, Load actually got stranger the more units it sold. How else do you explain the existence of the Hawd Gankstuh Rappuhs MCs (Wid Ghatz)’s Wake Up and Smell the Piss, a descent into perverted, excrement-obsessed, lo-fi noise-hop that probably sold no more than a dozen copies? This record even confused Load’s most hardcore fans.But by unleashing such wildly uncommercial music alongside proven sellers like Lightning Bolt, Load helped give a much larger platform to genius musicians who are way too left field and individualistic for even the indie rock marketplace. For that, Load deserves some kind of cultural service award. Thank you, Ben and Laura!Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

There’s a pungent whiff of familiarity to the 20 or so headliners anchoring Lollapalooza’s four-day roster. No less than 10 also played Coachella or Bonnaroo, while at least six are scheduled to appear at San Francisco’s Outside Lands as well. Then there’s LCD Soundsystem: They’re hitting up all four. Two notable exceptions are alt-rock veterans Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jane’s Addiction, though neither is a stranger to the Lollapalooza experience. If you attend America’s top branded festivals to catch hot-selling acts in indie, electronic music, and hip-hop, then all this curatorial regurgitation is good news. If, however, you attend them to explore unique, under-the-radar talent, then you’re best focusing on the names that appear in fine print, at the bottom of the concert poster.

It’s in the selecting of a music festival’s middle- to lower-tier acts that curators get to flex their adventurousness. This certainly is the case with Lollapalooza 2016. Even a cursory glance at the sprawling lineup churns up all manner of exotic treasures and cutting-edge hybrids. There’s gospel-fueled R&B (Sir the Baptist), cyborg folk-pop (Lewis Del Mar), darkwave-smeared post-hardcore (PVRIS), and brainy weirdo avant-rock (Autolux). Now, having said all that, this year’s installment still isn’t diverse enough. The last few years have been truly fertile ones for underground hip-hop and bedroom R&B, yet neither is sufficiently represented. Ditto for hard techno, which is thriving in adventurous clubs like New York’s The Bunker and Berlin’s Berghain. Clearly, crushing industrial beats don’t sell tickets quite like party-time EDM.

Phil Spector may be a homicidal madman with a skyscraping afro, yet he also is responsible for creating one of pop’s most iconic production styles: the wall of sound. Simple in effect yet complex in process, it entails the deliciously gratuitous spilling and layering of instruments (forget doubling — think tripling) until no single one is distinguishable from any other. The results are titanic, textural, and stunningly atmospheric pop songs that feel as though they’ve been bestowed upon mere mortals by the angels. Critics tend to believe that Spector’s wall reached it highest point on (Ike and) Tina Turner’s 1966 masterwork River Deep — Mountain High, but don’t overlook Dion’s Born to Be With You from 1975; in my opinion, its majestic power is unrivalled. Spector inspired a slew of badasses throughout the ’60s and ’70s. In addition to Beach Boy genius Brian Wilson and a young Bruce Springsteen on Born to Run, soul visionaries Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield erected their own unique walls of sound from the lushest of strings.Like Spector, these artists worked with large ensembles. The same cannot be said of The Byrds, Pink Floyd, and the minimalism-inspired Velvet Underground. Instead of leaning heavily on orchestral instrumentation, these mid-’60s pioneers built walls of sound, oftentimes spacey and reverb-drenched, from the distortion, fuzz, and feedback generally associated with rock-based instrumentation. Though it took several decades for their innovations to coalesce into an identifiable aesthetic, they certainly have influenced a great deal of the shoegaze, noise pop, and dream pop outfits to have emerged since the late ’80s. My Bloody Valentine’s absolutely hulking Loveless record, from 1991, has to be the modern era’s most startling expression of wall of sound tactics, though The Jesus and Mary Chain’s buzzing Psychocandy isn’t far behind. My personal favorite is The Flaming Lips’ Clouds Taste Metallic, which is like the perfect meeting point between Syd Barrett-era Floyd and The Beach Boys at their most psychedelic.

The age of the rock ‘n’ roll shaman is nearly gone. As far as frontman archetypes go, David Bowie’s cool and detached postmodernism won and Jim Morrison’s fiery and passionate romanticism lost. The idea of rock as something sacred and visionary has gradually gone out of fashion. This makes a singer like Mark Lanegan, who just released his 10th full-length, Gargoyle, a dead man walking. But he wouldn’t have it any other way.Ever since the longtime cult artist was a young underground rocker—one clearly inspired by Morrison and haunted punk-bluesman Jeffrey Lee Pierce, whose performances were regularly described as séances and possessions—Lanegan and his dark, cavernous, graveyard groan have been evoking spirit images of archaic apparitions and the underworld. In particular, the singer’s rendition of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” (which predates Nirvana’s) sounds like a transmission from hell. Meanwhile, his lyrics come littered with Jungian imagery and references to religion and altered states of consciousness: In the 2004 single “Hit The City,” a sublimely ominous rocker featuring PJ Harvey on backing vocals, he sings about darkness, the promised land, ghosts, and kingdom come—that’s some grade A esoterica.Shamans are loners, people who participate in village life yet largely live outside of it, and that’s Lanegan to a tee. While he spent a good deal of his early years with Screaming Trees—a Pacific Northwest band who were always more in tune with the otherworldliness of ’80s psychedelia than sweaty dude-grunge—he started his solo career way back in 1990 with The Winding Sheet. Since then, the 6’ 2” brooder has cut a labyrinthine path: In addition to a slew of solo gems blending mountain folk balladry, gothic-tinged blues rock, dream pop, and even electronic, he’s racked up short-lived collaborations with stoner rock gods Queens of the Stone Age, Scottish chanteuse Isobel Campbell, fellow alt-rock icon Greg Dulli, avant-garde guitarist Duke Garwood, and electronic producer Moby. Lanegan loves working with other musicians, he just never sticks around for very long. Perhaps that’s because the vocalist, like any shaman, ultimately feels more at home in the spirit world than our own.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

“Techno is a brain-dead exercise of plastic sound.” Those were the words Thurston Moore chose to utter in a recent episode of Pitchfork’s “Over/Under” series, and goddamn did they ignite a burst of social media disputes and outrage. Techno and house music diehards were incensed, labeling the indie legend a white male rocker has-been who doesn’t know jack. His defenders, meanwhile, dismissed his detractors as whiny, thin-skinned club brats who take themselves too seriously. It’s a dustup that’s just another manifestation of the rock vs. dance music rivalry that flared up in 1979 when the Chicago White Sox hosted the infamous Disco Demolition Night.This stuff is so played out. Clearly, the folks on both sides of the “Thurstongate” debate don’t listen to many mainstream jams. If they did, they’d realize that rock and electronic dance music, once rivals, have now cross-pollinated to such an extent that it’s often impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. Simply look at Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs chart for the week of July 1, 2017: the top three songs—Imagine Dragons’ “Believer,” Twenty One Pilots “Heathens” (this thing is just never going to leave the charts, is it), and Linkin Park’s “Heavy”—are produced like dance tracks: Programming and sequencing fill every conceivable space; keyboards are all over the place; and vocals frequently dip into rapping and/or an R&B/dance-pop falsetto. Guitars are in the mix, but they’re no longer a core quality.This is just the tip of the iceberg. Ever since Aaron Bruno (a.k.a. AWOLNATION) introduced the novel idea of marrying a Black Keys/White Stripes-style thump and grungy power chords to electropop synths, EDM shimmer, and even some chopped and screwed goop, modern rock has witnessed a surge of artists who simply don’t give a shit about operating within the genre’s traditionally drawn boundaries. There’s Lorde, X Ambassadors, Rag’n’Bone Man, Bastille, Issues, and MISSIO (whose massive, electro-rock anthem “Middle Fingers” probably is unknown to most folks over the age of 30). Even South Africa’s KONGOS, who utilize plenty of chunky, distorted-riff action, build their songs for both the arena and club.All this prompts the question: trend or the new normal? Hard to tell. After all, the charts still see action from garage-bred dudes like Jack White, Benjamin Booker, and the Black Lips who remain faithful to a classic conception of rock ’n’ roll. But it does seem as if Twenty One Pilots and Imagine Dragons, as well as every other artist on our playlist, are expressions of deeper shifts in rock’s relationship to digital production technology that are going to continue to become more far-reaching. Of course, we could run out of energy by the end of the decade; in that case it’s back to folk music for everybody.