#songbender part 57 – Hallucinogen – L.S.D.
well hello once again, i felt like it was, like, er, time.
so i thought maybe it’s time for a
*insert twirly wirly video effect here*
MIKULÁS DOUBLE HEADER this week. as it is the time of the year where children get presents into their shoes from a saint, or something something, and let’s not go into why in the Western culture it is also coming at Xmas and is it the same guy? Is it the apprentice? Who is it then? The Hogfather? (we got one of those over here, bleeeeh)
ANYWAY. let’s not go into that, really.
So the reason for all of this, going back to psytrance, and actually, OH, yes, ACTUALLY, doing one of the BIG ONES, And i mean it.
Ladies and Gentlemen, especially those who, ok, we’re not going there, so erm khmmm, so here you go. This is THE psytrance album of ALL TIME.
Yes and this time (hahha) i did NOT use the thing when somebody calls something a something that is one of the somethings of all time. I hope you get what i mean.
Anyway.
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, this is one of the biggest songs of all time.
There, i said it.
And i will die on that hill, and just so you know, that hill is too steep for you, you fat FUCK, you can’t even go 10 meters on that hill, that hill is what hills you. Haaa Haaa.
So in case you don’t know, i suspect you suspect, but this psytrance thing is now only a niche genre (oh i love these words, please wait while i vomit), so in any case, PSY is actually goa evolving to the next phase, and if you’ve been around, you may know that I actually think these things matter, so this is akshually important
By which i mean that trance was so, erm, pedantic, ok? it was so NICE. it was for people on the dancefloor, with nothing but a Miss Lemon flavored mineral water. Hah yeah. We all loved that one.
So the point is that trance was always this “how can i make the people sitting in the booths come to the floor” kinda mindset, and then comes psytrance and says: “YOU BETTER fkin stay there, or else there’s gonna be a whole section of photos about you making an ASS outta yourself”
because that’s EXACTLY the point.
PSY is this.
PSY is the disturbing one. The one that gets to you. The one that creeps up to you and you think you know better, aaahaha i got a fkin degree, i can take anything. Well OK Bro.
This is 1995 we’re talking here. Right? 30 fkin years ago.
And just to be fair, i mean i hope i don’t have to confess once again what a posford fan i am, i mean, really. If i do have to, i won’t. Grrh. Jeez. Come on.
SO this is what leapt Hallucinogen on the top. This actual song, and this very album as such. This is such a masterpiece, even though it doesn’t sound “modern” these days, you again need to remember that this was for the dancefloor back then. It was a simpler world, simpler times, simpler people.
Oh ok we’re in the middle, that’s when the least of the readers are reading, so let me put here a personal thing. You would’nt actually believe it, but i only got the WEIGHT of this whole thing YEARS after it happened.
So back in my day, strong shory lort, there was no internet, only in university computer rooms, and such, yes, old, fkoff, we were cavemen. I remember myself discovering this song and immediately i went for the spoken words, and i couldn’t actually figure out what the hell that person was saying.
And as a result, i went to the university computer room, and through a telnet to a fkin SunOS whatever version, with LYNX, i posted a question to a forum dealing with these things, that, hey, can someone decipher what the actual fuck this person is speaking of?
And some days and weeks passed, and i actually did not even care. But then i got an email on my account on the actual fucking dragon.klte.hu (if you know, you know), which went along like, hey, saw your post, here’s the lyrics, it’s about this kid of the lsd pope, he said these, and i thought it was fun to use. regards,
SIMON P.
yes.
I actually got an actual email from Simon himself, which, of course, today, in the world of Patreon and Twich and whatever, is not really a thing anymore, as people love to see themselves when they paid for the opportunity, but this was different. There was no pat or tw or anything. We were just checking the same forums. Mind – blown. I mean come on man. You must understand how this is.
Allright, let’s go through this.
So, the first thing: you need to give this thing volume. That’s because this is not the current modern times when everything is mixed to the max, this NEEDS you to understand. This is a thing with old music, you need to adjust sometimes, you need to make it feel like it wanted to be felt, you know? These days it’s overproduced and overmixed and overFUCKED most of the time. And i believe this is what the smart ones would call FLAT in terms of it being frequentially 1994, and that’s all there is to it. If you can overcome these days the way it sounds, and can actually adapt, you rule. If not, well, that’s on you my man.
This is such a masterpiece, no wonder all of the literature regarding it says so. There was actually a synth line i never discovered through cassette-walkman-headphones, until i had the mp3 version, years after. I discovered synth lines in this i never heard before. And it only made it better.
This is the first song on the Hallucinogen album, it’s the biggest hit and you can guess my opinion right here: it’s NOT the best one on the album. There are way better ones in there. But you can not go over the fact that this song is the granddad of psytrance. This has everything psytrance needs and ever was. It’s an iconic song, the anthem of psy. There, i said it.
I asked my dear friend, the AI bot, to jump online and check for stuff I may not know myself, as the song, well, yeah, i can exam that shit any hour of the night you want me to, but i may not be familiar with the background, so here you go:
Underground banger that accidentally charted
For a track basically built for Goa parties and muddy fields:
- The Twisted album hit #27 in France, and Hallucinogen’s French bio notes that the intro track, “L.S.D.”, making the Top 50 was a huge anomaly for such an underground style.Wikipedia+1
- Some early pressings of Twisted had a neon orange sticker on the case saying “Contains L-S-D” – simultaneously a joke and a wink to anyone crate-digging.Discogs
So you had a record with a giant, trippy cover, a sticker basically shouting “THIS HAS LSD”, and it still slipped into mainstream charts. Very mid-90s.
Butterfly Studios & the “small rig, huge sound” thing
The track comes out of a very specific physical place:
- Recorded at Youth’s Butterfly Studios in Brixton, where Simon worked as an engineer. Multiple bios phrase it as “the seeds of Hallucinogen were sown at Butterfly Studios, where he created the trance classic ‘LSD’.”Discogs+3Angelfire+3DJ Jaxx+3
- Early Dragonfly / Butterfly lore plus producer chatter point to a pretty modest 90s setup: Mackie 8-bus desk, hardware samplers and synths, Atari-based sequencing – the kind of rig a lot of first-wave Goa producers used. One studio discussion explicitly notes that Hallucinogen and The Prodigy both did their early albums on a Mackie 8-bus.Gearspace+1
So that ridiculous stereo image and movement in LSD is basically early-90s hardware + clever engineering, not some giant SSL temple.
Hidden co-writers: it’s not only Simon
Even though it’s a Hallucinogen track, the official metadata is a bit more nuanced:
- MusicBrainz credits Nick Barber (Doof) and Ott, alongside Simon, as composers for the recording of “L.S.D.” on Twisted.MusicBrainz
Which fits what’s known about that circle anyway – people hanging around Butterfly, bouncing ideas, tweaking each other’s tracks. The Hallucinogen name is on the cover, but there’s definite Doof/Ott DNA in there.
Weeeelll what do you fkin know. My man Ott is right there. Hah.
In a Keyframe Entertainment interview about psytrance in North America, one DJ says the first psy track they ever heard as a kid was Hallucinogen – LSD on a mixtape. They went home, asked their dad what LSD was, and he almost fell out of his chair at the dinner table.keyframe-entertainment.com
Old-school Goa / psy FB groups and forums regularly run nostalgia posts where someone drops LSD (or LSD ’93) and the comments are just a wall of “this was my first trip / first party / first real Goa moment”.
And akshually, the reason this came to mind in the first place is that i have a remix of this (which was so common back in the day) from the actual OTT himself, and i thought, this could be the next song on #songbender. But it’s not really fair to put in a remix, if you’re not familiar with the original, right? I mean when an original is something like THIS one, it needs its own post.
And it gets it. (GN’R Civil War reference right here folks).
So, enjoy. Psy is hard. It needs multiple listens to get across to you. Especially if you are new. Or semi-advanced. Or anything.
This is a masterpiece, this whole album is something else, really. And this is the first song, and i like the other ones better, but can you imagine, it’s because this (otherwise unknown, not exactly radio-material popular kinda) was overplayed? Yeah. Those were the days.
Just check what the AI has to say:
The final mix is deceptively quiet
Most listeners today hear mastered psy at ~-4 to -6 LUFS.
Twisted sits around:
-12 to -14 LUFS
At first you think “Wow, it’s quiet”…
…but then you realize you can crank it extremely loud, and it still doesn’t distort or fatigue.This is why LSD feels so powerful on a big system even today.
It’s a mastering philosophy from a different era.
Well there you have it.
Have fun with this one for now, i’ll be back with the remix of this one tomorrow, as we have our first double-header!
Same bad time, same bad channel. right?