Some Rare Melodic-Psychedelic Symbioses

By Caliso Bercrim Sonclover III

LSD is symbiotic to music like no other drug. It has facilitated profound experimentation in musical creation and enjoyment since its synthesis in 1938. The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and the Summer of Love are symbolic of the transfiguration of classic pop-rock into the fluid and surreal musical avant-garde of the late 1960s and early 1970s. But beyond those household names lurk a subset of folk-inspired musicians who made serious contributions to psychedelic sound. I present here a selection of lesser-known psychedelic renderings from Turkey and Britain that are uniquely trippy but take a common inspiration in the traditional sounds of their respective cultures. 

Moğollar, Les Danses et Rhythmes de la Turquie d’hier á aujourd’hui (Anadolu Pop), 1971

The 1961 Turkish constitution, developed in the wake of the previous year’s coup d'état, embedded laicism. Islamic institutions were abolished in favour of secular freedom of expression, and leftist thought flourished. This liberal atmosphere, the ubiquity of Western pop radio, and music competitions held by the monolithic newspaper Hürriyet encouraged young Istanbulites to combine traditional Anatolian folk melodies with mid-century transatlantic pop-rock sensibilities. Influenced by Elvis Presley cameos at outdoor cinemas and anyone name-dropped in Jane Birkin’s wistful “Ex-fan des sixties” (“des Shadows, des Doors, des Animals”), a talented group of young men dressed in sheepskin boots and vests over floral shirts brought together the old and the new; Moğollar (“the Mongolians” in Turkish, evocative of wilderness) conceived a new genre of Turkish psychedelic rock. 

By the early 1970s, Moğollar were based in Paris, and collaborated with other Turkish folk rock legends such as the Belgium-based Barış Manço (himself a psych pioneer well worth a listen; the band briefly rebranded as Manchomongol). The grand prize of the Académie Charles Cros, celebrating musical innovation, was awarded in 1970 to Jimi Henrix, 1971 to Moğollar, and 1972 to Pink Floyd. 

The band’s debut album, Anadolu Pop, is a delectable capsule of electrified Anatolian folk. To fund studio sessions the band sold their drum sets, amps, and organs; what emerged was a series of intricate instrumental tracks dominated by guitar and folk instruments such as the saz. Anadolu Pop offers the listener abundant warmth and light whether they are tripping or not. 

Another military coup d'état in 1980 quashed the liberal vicennium and forced prominent leftie rockers into censorship, imprisonment, and exile, drawing the golden age of Turkish psychedelic rock to an abrupt close and replacing it with gloomy, self-indulgent Arabesque. 

Lady June and Kevin Ayers, Linguistic Leprosy (1974)

A shining emblem of the English agrestic psychedelic is Kevin Ayers’ Whatevershebringswesing, released on Harvest Records in 1972. Ayers and Daevid Allen (who spearheaded the psychedelic musical international with Gong) were founding members of the Canterbury scene; temporal contemporaries of Moğollar, these semi-rural aesthetes-on-acid brought spaced-out poetic surrealism to folkish prog-rock.

The young sun-worshipping Ayers couldn’t refuse when he and his flatmate Robert Wyatt were invited by the latter’s namesake and mentor Robert Graves to summer in Mallorca. Graves was an accomplished poet, historical novelist, and Oxonian contemporary of Lawrence, Sassoon, and Owen. Also holidaying on Mallorca was the great British eccentric and “cosmic prankster” June Cramer. 

Cramer was involved with Michel Albert, the beautiful artist son of a French right-wing general, who was known for trying to paint his acid trips. She was also friends with Graves, and their bohemian literary-artistic community in Deià is redolent of a technicolour revival of the earlier, less hedonistic Bloomsbury Group. Back in London Cramer’s Maida Vale flat was an open hub for the city’s creatives; it was thus dubbed the city’s “premier smoking salon”, and she “Lady June” (as in “land-lady” – but in a pre-gentrification hippie way). Ayers moved in and it was here, with £400, that the unlikely pair with Brian Eno recorded their Linguistic Leprosy, a deeply trippy collection of tone poetry and hallucinatory sound.

I would recommend to the nascent tripper a virgin experience with this album; play it early on and revel in the bemusement and beauty of a truly unique comedic-poetic trove. Admire Lady June, an unsung English enigma whose quietly brilliant art should not be relegated to the fleetingly whimsical: Linguistic Leprosy stands up in its innovation to Boards of Canada and Chris Morris’ Blue Jam, gifted to us decades years later. 

Consider too that like Lady June, your mousy landlady might be open to poetry readings, beachside flirtations, and radical musical innovation, after a joint or a tab.

Julian Cope, Fried (1984)

After the drug-fuelled disintegration of his band The Teardrop Explodes (I recommend the fantastic Kilimanjaro), lead singer Julian Cope drifted into the arena of the unwell. Dubbed an acid casualty (alongside Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd), it was felt that Cope had blown his mind on drugs and lost his knack for producing pristine sophisti-pop. These perceptions were amplified when, during a promotional concert at the Hammersmith Palais for his poorly received solo debut World Shut Your Mouth, Cope lacerated his torso with a broken microphone stand in a fit of anarchic self-mutilation. 

This episode is relayed in the jaw-dropping opening track of Cope’s glorious sophomore effort (Fried), “Reynard the Fox”. What follows is a collection of disarmingly vulnerable, effortlessly glamorous psychedelic rock. The lead single, “Sunspots”, is nervous, sun-baked romance at its finest; every undergraduate ought to be acquainted. Cope’s proclivity towards the beautiful bizarre is expressed in the album’s artwork, which features the singer naked but for a large turtle shell, crouched atop the Alvecote Mound slag heap.

Cope is a dedicated archaeologist and antiquarian, chronicling stone circles and other ancient English monuments. The prehistoric and the psychedelic coexist not just in his music: in 2001 the British Museum was evacuated when Cope, dressed in five-inch platform boots to lecture on Avebury and Odin, set off fire alarms with his hairspray. 

The KLF, Chill Out (1990)

My favourite track on Fried is Bill Drummond Said, a tongue-in-cheek pisstake (or urinary extraction exercise as per Q Magazine’s Andrew Collins) dedicated to the titular Drummond, a Scottish musician who later joined Jimmy Cauty to form the nouvelle avant-garde electronic group the KLF. The KLF were best known for becoming the world’s best-selling singles act in 1991, then promptly deleting their back-catalogue and burning £1 million (over $5 million NZD inflated for today) in a pagan ritual on the island of Jura. 

But before the smash hits and the industry antics (which deserve their own Salient article) came Chill Out, a hazy, single-take live audio collage. Samples from Elvis and Fleetwood Mac hits, Tuvan throat singers, and radio reports of fatal motor accidents, are woven together in a post-impressionist melange with ambient desert soundscapes of bushwhacked country road static and bleating sheep. Sheep were a recurring motif for the KLF, featured on the album artwork for Chill Out, making surprise appearances at club PAs, and ultimately going to the slaughter for the band’s music industry exeunt at the 1992 Brit Awards. The pastoral field, with sheep grazing, was of course the morning-after site of the clandestine, euphoric 90s British rave scene temporarily helmed by the KLF. 

Ira Robbins of Trouser Press called Chill Out "the pleasantly attenuated soundtrack to a non-existent film that is easily forgotten." This was apt, for the band produced an unfinished ambient road movie, The White Room, comprised of forty minutes of Lynchian footage of the KLF’s 1968 cop car, Ford Timelord, through nocturnal London and the Spanish Sierra Nevada. This is the feeling imbued in Chill Out: suspended in the liminal somewhere between a comedown and the dawn of a new day, this is ideal listening athe a trip’s bookends. 

Nekropsi, Mi Kubbesi (1996)

The best-selling foreign language album in Turkish history is Metallica’s self-titled, released in 1991. Decades after Moğollar, innovations in Western music once again inspired a generation of Turkish students to revisit folk sounds. 

In 1989 my uncle formed Nekropsi. Alongside bands like Pentagram (now Mazarkabul; my mother used to date their bassist), Nekropsi brought traditional Anatolian sounds into that decade’s dominant genres of experimental industrial, psychedelic, and metal. The mercurial Mi Kubbesi is, like Anadolu Pop, comprised of complex guitar-led instrumentals. Nekropsi’s sound is like water, tumbling rapidly from cold and clear to gargling and murky like a rural brook. Mood, tempo, and form dip and shift like a shopper in a crowded bazaar (“Çarşı”); track lengths vary allowing the listener to lose themselves in their mind’s depth (“Derinlik”). Like the Bosphorus Bridge depicted on the artwork for their follow-up album 2, Nekropsi fed into the Turkish tradition of bringing together East and West. 

In March 2025, Istanbul’s mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, the pre-eminent opposition figure to the autocratic Islamofascist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had his university diploma (a prerequisite for the presidency) annulled by his alma mater and was arrested on fabricated charges shortly thereafter. Student-led protests have been met with violent policing involving pepper spray, water cannons, and rubber bullets, in the largest public crackdown since the Gezi Park movement of 2013, which took place in reaction to the same tyrant for similar reasons. Like life, British and Turkish politics move in cycles; in both cases, we are perhaps overdue for a reaction in the form of a new psych-rock renaissance.