Psychedelic Affordances in the Music of Highasakite

Abstract

The late Sheila Whiteley examined how different styles of psychedelic rock in the 1960s and early 1970s shared a common musical rhetoric (or “codes”) that, together with the socio-cultural context in which the music was presented and heard, conveyed elements of the psychedelic experience. In this essay, the author probes further the ways in which some types of popular music serve to represent the psychedelic experience, not so much through semantically stable stylistic codes but through the affordances these sound-shapes and their context provide. To illustrate the application of this expanded notion of psychedelic musical rhetoric, he examines the psychedelic aspects of some of the music of contemporary Norwegian pop band, Highasakite, whose work provides a good example of the post-millennial evolution of the musical vision of psychedelia’s earliest proponents.