Terence McKenna is among the most-sampled voices in the world of psychedelic electronic music. I actually suspect he is the single most-sampled individual, but am willing to admit that my position on this may be skewed by my own availability heuristic as his archivist. I would actually be quite interested to hear from any of you reading this if you think that there might be other contenders (for instance, it seems to me that Alan Watts, Robert Anton Wilson, and Timothy Leary are significantly less-sampled, comparatively). Since I’ve been tracking this phenomenon to the best of my ability for many years now, I thought it only appropriate to share some of the fruits of that effort with the audience of the Terence McKenna Archival Blog.
Here, then, are a series of YouTube Playlists, in which I have segregated a few different styles of music into which Terence McKenna has been sampled. I would be greatly obliged to anyone who can help me fill in these playlists with music that I didn’t know about. If you are an artist or label who has an album containing relevant samples and would like to donate a physical copy to be housed in the archives, please email terencemckennaarchives@gmail.com.
Please support these artists by purchasing their work and going to their events!
The first and most extensive (and my personal favorite) is the “Downtempo” Playlist, which consists predominantly of psychedelic downtempo/chillout music. This is a great playlist to just leave running in the background if you want a chill environment with occasional bits of Terence woven in:
The next playlist also consists of psychedelic electronic music but of the more fast and driving, high BPM, 4/4 beat, “Psytrance” genre. This playlist is less complete than the downtempo playlist; expect it to fill up more over time:
Finally, I have a playlist that includes “Everything Else”:
Enjoy
!
Here are some of my favorite individual songs from among these playlists (mostly from the downtempo):
Some Terence Hip-Hop:
Some Clubby Terence:
Whatever you’d call this light-hearted tribute:
And, probably the most high-profile artist who mentions (but doesn’t sample) Terence McKenna is Sheryl Crow in her song ‘Chances are’ from her ‘Wildflower’ album, which has the verse:
