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Previewing Austin Psych Fest with The Black Angels’ Alex Maas

This weekend, the fifth annual Austin Psych Fest kicks off in Austin, TX. Hosted annually by The Black Angels, the festival displays a wide array of psychedelic acts over three days in intimate indoor settings. This year, the Austin Psych Fest welcomes some of the top acts on the scene, including Brian Jonestown Massacre, Woods, Dead Meadow, Thee Oh Sees, Black Lips, Wooden Shjips, Olivia Tremor Control and many more. While preparing to get this year’s festival underway, Black Angels vocalist Alex Maas took the time to speak with us about the rapidly expanding festival and the growing contemporary psych movement.

The Austin Psych Fest is now in its fifth year. Can you talk about how you first came up with the idea for the festival and what the inspiration was for it?

One of the main reasons why we’re doing the festival is because there wasn’t a festival in Austin that brought our favorite artists. You have ACL and South by Southwest, but those are just insanely big and you can’t see the bands you want to see. Through all the years of touring, we’ve met tons of amazing artists that we want to tour with or that we’ve seen and this is just our chance to bring them all to Austin and show Austin what’s happening in the psychedelic music scene, which is growing tremendously. There’s tons of different types of genres of psych. Basically, it’s just a chance for us to bring all of these artists together and present a festival that showcases all of them.

At first it just started out as this one day thing during SXSW, then tons of people started showing up to it. Then the next year, we did it again and people started flying in from out of state and out of the country and we were like “woah, maybe people would want to come to this thing for a couple of days?” So that’s how it started and it’s kind of taken off from there. We’re still fairly small at this point, but it’s started to take on a life of its own.

How many attendees are you expecting this year?

We’re expecting 2,000 a day. So 6,000 total over the whole weekend, maybe a little bit more. Each year we’ve been slowly growing the festival. We haven’t had a crazy huge spurt in growth, but at the same time if you look at the genre, it’s slowly been inclining in terms of popularity. We talk about how everything is cyclical. Everything in psychedelic music is cyclical—every 20 years or so it comes back around. And who knows how long this will last, but now with so many people really expanding their sound the potential of the genre can really grow. It’s just a matter of how many people want to refer to their sound in that way.

I read somewhere once that “psychedelic” is the most misleading term used to describe music.

It totally is. And actually, it’s to the benefit of the genre that it’s misleading. Any style of music can be referred to as that. But if you go back to the first elements of psychedelic rock and roll, that has a certain sound. It’s very unmistakable. It’s got a certain sound. But it’s misleading and, for a while there, it was also deterring people from getting into it. People just didn’t take these artists seriously, or they thought they were all about drugs and that’s just not true. The music should take you there. And that’s kind of the whole misconception as well, that there’s this whole culture behind it. I know tons of people in psychedelic bands that are creating this sound and they’re completely straight and sober people who have never done anything in their entire lives. It has less to do with that and more to do with the sound that they’re creating—how the music is making the people feel.

You mentioned the cyclicality of the psych genre. I’ve read that psychedelic music often comes around, specifically, during war times or times of disaster and conflict—which we are definitely living in now. What are your feelings about the reasons behind this current psychedelic revival and it’s continuing growth?

I would totally agree. Art is always reflecting the political climate and the climate that’s happening, whether it’s a complete opposite reaction or whether it’s with it. I definitely think that the scarier things get, the more turmoil, the more chaos, the lack of information, the lack of truth given to the public, the lack of care from the public to search for the truth, and people being blind to what’s happening around them creates a kind of fear and it’s not just in the music scene. I think that all kinds of art are reflecting the state of society, and always have.