ABSTRACT
Definitions of psychedelic music and culture inevitably invoke the counterculture of the West, especially the USA, in the 1960s. But what of the rest of the world?
As the movement and musical style spread beyond its Anglo-American base, its potential for artistic expression blossomed in multifarious and often surprising ways, exposing some of its contradictions and limitations in the process. Using case studies from outside the “West” – Brazil’s Tropicália movement and from the “Celtic” fringes of the English-speaking world: experimental and underground music from Ireland, 1970s to the present and neo-psychedelia in 1990s Wales, this paper will consider the complex relationship of psychedelic music to the cultures in which it took root, considering how it acted as both a globalising challenge to prevailing musical orthodoxies of these times and places as well as an instigator of indigenous musical countercultures.
