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Rating: Rocky Erickson and his group, the 13th Floor Elevators, were among the first to experiment with LSD in the musical field in Texas and beyond. In 1966, a crucial year for the stylistic and musical evolutions of the decade, the album The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators was released, driven by a visceral manifesto Freak Blues called You're Gonna Miss Me, in which Erickson's hallucinatory voice, accompanied by Tommy Hall's electrified sensory jug, created an epochal song, a forerunner of a very cerebral and distorted album.
Manifesto Album of the new American "hallucinated realities," which, at the time, did not achieve great success but consecrated the band as one of the most sincere and yet out-of-time of the period.
Songs like Splash 1, Reverberation, and Fire Engine have been an inspiration for dozens of other artists of our time, and this genuine sincere interest has led to the group's reevaluation after decades.
Erickson's stoned days, leading the group, took the leader to hospitalization in a psychiatric hospital after breaking the law with his head dissolved in acid. Forty years later, the charm of the work remains intact in its raw, and perhaps even desperate, sound.
A true Cult.
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By psychopompe
The 13th Floor Elevators embody the most spontaneous and sincere idea of psychedelia.
This very instrument with its disorienting sound… gives the compositions a subtly unsettling and deeply hallucinogenic character.
By Lord Of Nothing
The genesis of psychedelia is here, in these grooves, in this expanded space filled with luminescent reverberations.
"Roller Coaster" stands as an ode to lysergic ecstasy with its mind open to decades of future music.
