Near the end of my freshman year of college, goth, newly broken-up from my lesbian girlfriend, wearing black trenchcoats and smoking clove cigarettes, depressed and trying to impress a girl I barely knew, i did a hit of acid. (The other acid voyagers were the lady and her ex, and our minders were his pals. I had no idea how vulnerable acidheads are, or how messed up this dynamic is. In retrospect I'm lucky they were nice guys, or they could've really destroyed me.) The results were bad.
I felt my flesh become clay; I saw the thin air become frozen crystal; I ground my teeth heroically as the cold steel bones of the universe revealed themselves through geometric and unexpected apertures in solid reality. I was convinced that I could see past and future, and into the minds of my companions. Ordinary humans became bizarrely proportioned sideshow freaks, and I myself an ancient and decaying corpse. There were unexpected moments of reward and beauty: shimmering dragons emerged in institutional bathroom tile, and forlorn trees amidst the halogen-lit parking lot deserts suddenly bloomed into complex mathematical spirals filled with sublime divinity. But coming down the next day, I listened to Echo & The Bunnymen (another post, perhaps) and watched mutilation and torture movies projected from my eyeballs to the dorm ceiling. Several months passed while I slowly put reality back together, unhappy and in existential shock. I believed then (and believe now, somewhat) that what I experienced on the drug was just as real as what I experience off it. This raises some difficulties, to put it mildly.
Later I tried acid again, and low doses of mushrooms. In better mind-states I found a higher ratio of beauty to horror, though always there was some terror, whether of the lurking divinity's brilliance (a sunset on ocean endlessly fractaled into unbearable delight) or of the cruelty and emptiness of the surrounding world (helicopters in the city night, hunting shrieking human prey). But for many years these experiences defined much of who I was. To this day a great many of my personal spiritual beliefs have to do with the sacred geometry of nature and the omnipresence of divinity, which tenets I first glimpsed on that one banal night of risk-taking and fear.
Anyway, during this initial refractory period I picked up a Spacemen 3 album on cassette. It stayed on heavy rotation through many years afterward.
Now, a decade and a half later, this album sounds like a pastiche of influences: Stooges, MC5, Stones, Thirteenth Floor Elevators, etc. But what the hell. The band members were working what then (in the bleak end of the 80s) was an untapped vein, and they worked it hard. Some of this still is startlingly great. Later they made Spectrum, and Spiritualized, and E.A.R., all of it worth hearing, and all of it devoted, at least in some degree or fashion, to the inital promise of the motto: "Taking drugs to make music to take drugs to". (I'm keenly aware that much of the album is more heroin-chic than acid-head, at least in intention. But my experience was all about bong hits and trips, so that's what it means to me).
Post is in two parts due to filesize restrictions. Unzip to one folder and put it on your tongue.
You know how sometimes you hear an album, and think, this is the music I've wanted to hear all my life?
Songs about drinking, and more songs about drinking, and then songs that sound better if you're drunk. Also, they sound great the rest of the time.
Early-80s new-wave horror-hard-rock splatter. It took me years of loving this record and wishing it were different, before I realized how great it is, just as it was made.
Great golden-age conscious rap, in which The Nation of Gods and Earths is revealed to be glorious fun, as reflected via endlessly creative beats, wacky digressions, and loose, dizzyingly speedy and playful wordplay. 
A sort of post-modern guitar virtuoso (formerly of the polymorphously perverse Sun City Girls) struts his stuff, somehow pulling a Chet Atkins by managing to play circles around every other guitarist alive, without sounding like a mere show-off. The sheer breadth of invention helps, as does the fact that he's actually playing music, not just notes. Non-guitarists will also enjoy this greatly, in fact.+F.jpg)
Post-Spacemen 3 synthy dream-drone. The first song is rock, the rest is mostly made for napping and/or home sedations. A bit 1990s-sounding now, but still pretty unique in its way.
Possibly the exact midpoint between Bjork and Nico. With spectacularly creative, minimal, instrumentation. In French.
I've been working on a solo acoustic guitar album. This isn't it: this is just the demo I recorded yesterday so that I can hear what the songs I've been working on sound like. So, there are lots of errors, some squonky notes, some hesitations and stumbles, and a couple distorted moments from being overly casual with the microphone levels. Also, most the songs run a little longer than is reasonable, due to the fact that I'm wandering around improvising a bit too much and trying to find my way back to the main motifs.
Great gloomy 80s psych. Definitely a glam crash, not the pop Bunnymen of the mid-to-late 80s, nor the crisp post-punk Bunnymen of Crocodiles, this is a twitchier, sobbier, drunker and stoneder collection of dour imagery, full of late-night collapses and horror flashes, a world in which all that was ever good in the world is lost forever and nothing that remains is worth saving. (Which is more or less how I remember most of the 1980s, actually). The band sounds driven, though, and the songs are beautiful.
Lower far right column now has a long list of great blogs to get/read about/be inspired by music from, in the event you find this one insufficient.
Among my all-time favorite reggae albums. This was mixed by Lee Perry (tho only intermittently in dub style), and the musicians include Sly Dunbar and Ernest Ranglin; but the real heart of the Congos is the singers, whose shimmering, gorgeous harmonies make every song a spine-tingler.
The album I listened to in the parking lot on my walkman at age 13, on that weird shivery day when I told the Sunday school class I'd been teaching, and my mom, that I didn't believe in God and wouldn't ever be coming back to church.
Dylan, Eno, Galaxie 500... sort of a mishmash of great rock music on this last mixtape post.
More rock goodness. This starts with the Bobby Fuller 4 (doing the song Clash fans know so well), but otherwise is pretty crunchy granola hippie. Byrds, Neil Young, Kinks. You know you love it. (If not, what's wrong with you?)
Closing in on the end of this massive mixtape series. Rockers will enjoy this one: it opens with the Stooges, and stays heavy and vital all 40 minutes. Nonstop headbanging. Roll a joint, do a shot of Jack Daniels, turn it up. Most rockers will know most the songs. You'll still enjoy it. I'm not bragging but it's hard to imagine a more consistently tuff cassette side than this. (Unless it be side A of the punk mix). Clearly this is where my roots are; I may not listen to much rock these days, but I've got a good grounding in it.
More R&B, this time less funk-centric but still pretty fun. If you're saying to yourself, what's the context for this? read older posts for more info.
