Lost in the Supermarket: Psych 101

The leaders of Seattle’s psychedelic scene go to Austin and learn how to grow

For the first day in May, it’s unseasonably chilly in Austin, Texas. Outside the Seaholm Power Plant, located off a gravel road southwest of downtown, local food vendors sell BBQ alongside chic boho threads as the sky fractures into threatening shards of indigo and ebony. The looming cylinders of the plant’s exhaust system recall the cover of the Pink Floyd album Animals, a fitting aesthetic for the evening’s post-industrial vibe. It’s the third and final day of Psych Fest 4, the fledgling festival curated by the Reverb Appreciation Society and the Austin-based band Black Angels. 

Inside the plant, iconic underdog Roky Erickson launches into a blessedly coherent set on the space’s mainstage, which is flanked by a precipitous drop-off into the bowels of the plant where a mammoth, skull-shaped light sculpture menacingly flickers. Later, the Angels themselves descend, delivering a propulsive, eerily erotic set that demonstrates the band is in its element.

Also in their element are spectators Emily Pothast and David Golightly, who play in Seattle’s Midday Veil and contribute to local psych collective Portable Shrines. The Shrines (originally founded by Aubrey Nehring and Darlene Nordyke in 2009) have been forging an infrastructure to support their music community’s slowly forming lysergic landscape, booking the annual Escalator Festival, hosting a DJ night at the Living Room every first and third Wednesday of the month, and most recently releasing Portable Shrines Magic Sound Theater Vol. 1, a vinyl compilation of (mostly) Seattle bands that includes AFCGT, Kinski, Diminished Men and This Blinding  Light. 

The compilation was birthed by Pothast, a University of Washington MFA graduate who currently lives on Capitol Hill. When I visit her at her apartment a few days after we’ve both returned from Austin, she’s in the midst of preparing for Midday Veil’s upcoming West Coast tour and is eager to talk about her Psych Fest experience.

“It was good to go to Austin and get an outside perspective [on our local scene],” she says. “They had 50 bands in a huge capacity venue. It was more intimate than South By Southwest, much more focused on one thing, and everyone was really friendly and open, interested in making contacts. But it also made me appreciate what we have going on here. There’s a small scale to it. Everyone knows each other.”

Intimacy was a key factor in putting together Magic Sound Theater. A mutual friend introduced Pothast to Pat Thomas from Light in the Attic Records, and the two struck a deal for a limited release of the collection. On Record Store Day, the album arrived packaged in a deluxe gatefold, adorned with the work of several Shrine collective contributors, including Steve Quenell, who has also designed surrealist, collage-based cover art for Six Organs of Admittance.

“We wanted to get as many artists that we could to contribute exclusive tracks,” Pothast says. The compilation features a wide range of subgenres beyond the rock-centric sound that was the key ingredient of the Austin festival, including more austere affairs, such as the Master Musicians of Bukkake. “Some people define psychedelic music as something that happened in this very specific time in the ’60s, and some people define it as people taking acid and improvising. It’s a really nebulous thing. The Portable Shrines umbrella covers a broader spectrum.”

Though Pothast appreciates the smaller scale of Seattle’s psych scene, the potential of the audience intrigues her the most. “I think the fact that AFCGT is on Sub Pop doesn’t say anything bad about AFCGT; I think it says something great about Sub Pop. It says that there’s a wider audience that wants to listen to minimalist, drone music, or music that’s abrasively loud and squealing in your ear. That there’s an audience for music that’s more challenging is a good thing.”

Portable Shrines has reached beyond the Northwest; Pothast has heard from fans in Greece and Belgium thrilled they could get their hands on Magic Sound Theater. She hopes the comp will serve as a calling card to bring like-minded touring bands to town, including the ones she saw in that Austin power plant.

“The compilation is bigger than all of us,” Pothast says. It’s  like sending up a little flare and hopefully it tells other bands that they should come up here and play shows. We’re documenting it in a way that I think people are responding to.”

Hannah Levin is a DJ at KEXP, one of the first radio stations in the U.S. to play the Black Angels debut, Passover. 

Midday Veil and This Blinding Light play the Comet Tavern on June 12 as part of the Noise For the Needy benefit series.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY VICTORIA RENARD