Trace Reddell is Professor of Art, Culture & Technology at the University of Denver. He is the author of The Sound of Things to Come, and his audiovisual performances and video works have screened at over thirty international venues.
How iconic psychedelic records of the 1960s unleash the transformative capacity of music to expand—and unhinge—the mind.
In the mid-sixties, the Beatles abandoned live performance, complaining they could no longer hear themselves on stage. Obsessed with the latest records of Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson, and with imaginations fueled by weed and acid, they retired to the studio. With the help of their producers and engineers, the Beatles left a trail of novel recording practices, audio technologies, and records in their wake. But their realization that the act of listening to recorded sound was itself a means for altering consciousness may be the Beatles’ most significant, though largely unacknowledged, contribution to psychedelia. The records of subsequent groups such as the 13th Floor Elevators, Pink Floyd, the Byrds, and Love further reveal how psychedelic music changes not just what we hear but how we listen.
In The Magic Circle, Trace Reddell threads accounts of his own psychedelic listening sessions into a hallucinatory tapestry of rock lore, drug literature, media studies, cognitive philosophy, and psychopharmacology. Proposing that the psychedelic record is a mind-manifesting drug, Reddell traces the effects of a magic circle—the feedback loop between the record and the listener—as it transforms culture, technology, and consciousness.
ENDORSEMENTS
“Profound, brilliant, and mind-expanding, Trace Reddell’s The Magic Circle will change how we think about recorded sound. A dazzling work of psychedelic media theory.”
—Ido Hartogsohn, author of American Trip
“Reddell's masterstroke is that music is psychedelia's third thing, the sonic substance dissolving the boundary between set and setting. A landmark work at the crossroads of sound studies, media theory, and psychedelic science.”
—Graham St John, author of Strange Attractor
“A potent brew that combines great stories about how the classics of psychedelic music were created with novel thinking around the relationship between sound technologies and hallucinogenic drug experience.”
—Randolph Jordan, Champlain College Saint-Lambert; author of Acoustic Profiles