![]() ![]() This past August, the Dundee Lodge Campout in Gaston, just outside Portland, provided an opportunity to see Old Time Relijun and a bunch of other psych bands play music in the woods. Also an artist, de Dionyso’s folkloric paintings appear on the covers of all of his albums, including for his gamelan-inspired side project Malaikat dan Sing. 1 established a sound cherry-picked from different styles circulating at the time: slightly grungy, sort of psych, mildly punk, kinda pirate-y, a little jammy, and with a lot of darkness. Old Time Relijun was formed in the mid-’90s in Olympia with Arrington de Dionyso serving as the frontman on guitar, bass clarinet, and vocals, with various members rotating in and out. Pre-order buy pre-order buy you own this wishlist in wishlist go to album go to track go to album go to track Some of the Seattle-based mushroom spores of today’s Cascadia psych from the 1990s include Sky Cries Mary, Critters Buggin, Sun City Girls, and Old Time Relijun. But with more female-fronted bands like Abronia or hip-hop that bends toward the far-out end of the psych spectrum like Shabazz Palaces, it doesn’t look like it’s staying that way. It’s hard to get around the fact that, like bioregionalism that clearly adopts but ignores any references to indigenous practices and psychedelic culture that continues to be dominated by white men (see: Michael Pollan positioning himself as today’s Timothy Leary), psych music in general has historically been a primarily white male genre. #Cascadea music serialThere’s also a primal element that’s like the drumbeat of your heart in your throat as you outrun a serial killer, or the past you left behind six states away. And by February, when you feel like you can’t take the rain anymore, there are impatient yowls for the sun. It holds the darkness of wet evergreens on a damp November night, when the sun has set at 4:30pm and nighttime is just a darker version of a long, grey day. More a feeling than a particular sound, Cascadia psych is rooted in the weird and often gloomy landscapes of the region. Sonically, Cascadia psych can be hard to pin down. Sidelined at the time by grunge, Cascadia psych arguably came into its own starting in the 1990s. And although he wasn’t revered by his hometown of Seattle during his time, there’s an unmistakable Jimi Hendrix resonance in a lot of the music. In some cases, there are Pacific Rim influences, particularly the dissonance of Indonesian gamelan. So what is Cascadia psych? It’s a regional genre with origins that can be traced back to 1960s Tacoma garage rock band The Sonics, whose stripped-down and aggressive songs were more punk than The Fabulous Wailers, also from Tacoma, who leaned more toward R&B. Psych music covers everything from garage bands to long, spaced-out guitar jams, to explosive sonic bursts with or without lyrics. Originally rooted in the experience of consuming Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), psilocybin (mushrooms), or mescaline (peyote), the routes to a mind-expanding experience have since extended beyond needing drugs to biohacking, meditation, and hypnosis-but anyone who has ever tripped will tell you it’s just not the same. There are six other North American bioregions, but it’s unclear if the idea has taken the same hold elsewhere as it has in the Pacific Northwest, where it’s since become an independence movement with people flying Cascadia flags outside their homes.Įmerging in the 1960s, psychedelia has similar sprawling tendencies, with fuzzy borders that can include or exclude certain elements. People might not know the ecological boundaries of Cascadia, but they do know the states it encompasses, which includes all of Washington, the southeastern corner of Idaho, and portions of Oregon, California, Nevada, Wyoming, Montana, Alaska, Yukon, and British Columbia. Bioregionalism, with its attendant environmental concerns, emerged in the 1970s as a way to forge collaboration between scientists, activists, artists, and anyone else advocating for the health of ecosystems. It includes 75 distinct ecoregions and the entire Columbia River watershed to the continental divide. ![]() The Cascadia bioregion extends from the Copper River in southern Alaska to Cape Mendocino outside San Francisco and inland to the Yellowstone Caldera. ![]()
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