How Tame Impala is Carrying On the Psychedelic Tradition
When we think of psychedelic music, our minds immediately think of the ‘60s pioneers like Jefferson Airplane and The Beatles. Tame Impala is coming to dominate the modern psychedelia scene, however, as it makes use of technology to continue in this tradition.
Written by Aidan Comiskey
Tame Impala at their October 11 ACL performance. Photo by Aidan Comiskey
As we approach psychedelic music’s seventh decade of existence, it would be easy to point to its inception during the ‘60s and ‘70s as its golden age. Tame Impala, a project led by musician Kevin Parker, challenges this assumption, however, with its modern-day exploration of the genre aided by the freedom provided by the advent of electronic instruments. The essence of psychedelic music remains the same — mimicking the sense of disorientation and depersonalization experienced by the users of psychedelic drugs. However, modern musicians have more tools available to create these effects. Take instrumentation, for example: where Eastern instruments, such as the tanpura in The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” were used in the past to create exotic sounds unfamiliar to Western listeners, musicians today are able to bring in ethereal timbres via electronic sounds. Parker has taken this and run with it, incorporating unusual synth lines in many of his works and deliberately confusing listeners with the instrumentation of his music through production effects.
Advances in technology have allowed psychedelia to expand into weirder dimensions during production. More gimmicky effects, like backwards tapes, have been supplanted by seamless edits to various instrumental and vocal tracks to create digital sounds that don’t have analog equivalents. Other production effects have continued to be used but have found new life as technology has advanced — stereo panning (changing output of different tracks in left and right channels) has become easier to do, allowing for artists like Parker to integrate it more seamlessly into their music, creating a smoother experience of warped reality. Think surrealism as opposed to Dadaism.
Perhaps where Tame Impala ups its psychedelic game the most isn’t in its music, but in its associated visuals. The main substantial visual accompaniment to the psychedelic music of the ‘60s and ‘70s came in the form of album art, with music videos minimal and few and far between. A good example of this is the Beatles’ cover for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which includes a mixture of cardboard cutouts and wax figures of historical individuals, musicians, and mystics alongside the Beatles, surrounded by a plethora of unusual props. What results is an unusual scene that one today would assume had to have been photoshopped — the cover thus represented a significant achievement in graphic design for the time, being an actual photograph. Parker’s project continues this tradition with his album covers, like the kaleidoscope-esque photograph that accompanies Innerspeakerand the abstract geometric graphic of Currents.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Image courtesy of Parlophone.
Innerspeaker. Image courtesy of Modular Recordings.
Currents. Image courtesy of Modular Recordings and Universal Music Australia.
But where Tame Impala truly brings its visual game is during its live performances. The use of lasers, smoke machines, and psychedelic-style videos and images, complete with the pièce de résistence that is a custom lighting ring, labeled “the spaceship” by fans, that swirls with myriad colors as it moves up and down during the show. The combination of these effects — and the way that they change throughout Parker’s sets — creates an experience best described as phenomenological. In one moment, the airy synth-powered intro envelops viewers as a sky of clouds and lasers moves across the audience. In the next moment, a ring of light descends upon the crowd as the smooth wall of sound sweeps across. It is in this way that Tame Impala carries the psychedelic tradition to new heights, fully immersing concertgoers in a sea of light and sound to transport them to a world too strange to be real, allowing the audience to experience, in a way, the mind-bending substances that inspired the performance.
Nothing will compare to the disruption that ‘60s psychedelia made to the music scene.. The development of new technology — whether for production, live visuals, or beyond — however, is allowing Tame Impala to carry on the tradition in ways original psychedelic artists could have never imagined.