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Far out: Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia is back

Michelle Lloyd

The celebration of psychedelic subculture returns to Camp and Furnace for two days of live music, DJ sets and exhibitions.

After being launched as a one-day event last year, Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia is back with a vengeance. Now encompassing a whole weekend’s worth of festivities across three performance spaces in Camp and Furnace; the event is billed as the UK’s largest celebration of psychedelic sub-culture. And it’s little wonder that the festival’s popularity has spread; you only have to look at last year’s “best of” lists to see that psychedelia is undergoing something of a renaissance. Acts like Tame Impala and Melody’s Echo Chamber have been lauded for their intoxicating musical journeys towards the reaches of human consciousness.

This year’s Liverpool Psych Fest line up sees acts from South America, Denmark, Germany and the US join forces with home grown talent. Sure-fire musical highlights include Ty Segall’s new project, Fuzz, multi-instrumentalist Jacco Gardner, Clinic, Heavenly Recordings’ Charlie Boyer and The Voyeurs and Glaswegian psychonauts The Cosmic Dead.

From Tame Impala to Clinic, psychedelia is undergoing something of a renaissance

Alongside the buzz bands, Sonic Boom performs a live collaboration with Heretic, the London-based visual artists and screen-printers. The Arts Council-supported project creates an engaging audiovisual installation within a bespoke gallery space to form an immersive visual sphere. Liverpool Psych Fest provides the only opportunity to experience this unique piece of work.

The festival’s non-music programme features a selection of short films curated by Shindig! Magazine and a lightshow from Innerstrings. University of Greenwich psychology lecturer David Luke gives a talk on “psychedelic sound and perception” while author Andy Roberts discusses the social history of LSD. An opening night show of “The Portal” – Julian Hand’s current visual accompaniment to The Oscillation’s show – sees the artist dabble in “glass slides, water coloured inks, coloured oils, and household chemicals.” That sounds pretty psychedelic to us.

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