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Hanging In the Fishbowl with East Village Radio’s Jeff Conklin

“The term ‘psychedelic’ is resistant,” says Jeff Conklin. “It kinds of transcends the trends, but it’s always there.” The 30-something DJ is gearing up for another Sunday night co-hosting Just Music, the long-running psych-and-otherwise show at Manhattan’s East Village Radio.

For the next two hours, Conklin—who also promotes the weekly This is Pop? series in Brooklyn—sits in the fishbowl window of a First Avenue storefront. He opens with a cut from the first Alice Cooper album. On Just Music (with Casey Block) and Conklin’s own Bring Our Your Dead, Conklin draws lines between worlds.

“I want to drag Deadheads in and expose them to the other side of music,” says, “But I also want to drag in hipster record collector nerds and make them realize that when they were passing up those Dead records in search of Faust or whatever, they should have grabbed Anthem of the Sun and realized how much they had in common.”

After spinning a track called “Shine On You Crazy Crystal Machine” by the Japanese noisemaker Hiroshi Hasegawa, Conklin pulls in a group of teenagers from Brooklyn into the booth and tries to bait them. They seem to have no opinions about anything, but it is freeform radio at its best.

Conklin spins some Kylie Minoise. A photographer friend wanders in from the street after work. She is working on a portfolio of dudes with particularly impressive beards. Like many, Conklin keeps tabs on psych scene, but is particularly fond of the music produced by his home borough.

“One of my favorite memories of the Brooklyn psych scene was in the old Mighty Robot space, an old auto garage, right underneath the Williamsburg Bridge,” he says. “It was the first time I ever saw Oneida. I was stone cold sober and hot as hell, but the visuals and Oneida just blew me away. I kept having this thought that this must be what the Acid Tests were like.”