Electronic Music

Terence McKenna Music

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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”:

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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:

Sheryl Crow01

This Week’s Terence McKenna Archival Haul (6/25/17)

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It’s been another slow week of intake at the Terence McKenna Archives. Only one item came through this week. Check out our crowdfund if you’d like to see more weekly acquisitions coming in.

  1. Jim de Rogatis’ book Turn on Your Mind: Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock contains a quote by and a paragraph mentioning Terence Mckenna.

    “The power of sound is almost an archetypal conceit of all theories of magic anywhere in the world. For us, magic means stagecraft and illusion, but for many people, it simply means another way of doing business with reality. Rave culture, to some degree, can be seen as a nostalgia for archaic and so-called primitive lifestyles….Music has to be percussive to address human physiology. I mean, you wouldn’t want to listen to too much Schoenberg on acid.” -Terence McKenna

    “Another hugely influential English act was the Shamen, who shifted gears in 1989 from post-punk psychedelic rock to more dance-oriented sounds while breaching the mainstream with the acid house hit, “Move Any Mountain.” In 1993, the group started a trend by recording Boss Drum with Terence McKenna, the American ethnobotanist who no less an authority than Timothy Leary called “the Timothy Leary of the ’90s.” The author of poetic pro-psychedelic tracts such as True Hallucinations, The Archaic Revival, and Food of the Gods, McKenna was the closest thing rave culture had to a guru. Although ravers failed to adopt all of his theories, he showed a keen understanding of the rock ‘n’ roll mindset with his central tenet that going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience is long going to the grave without ever having sex. Samples of such pronouncements delivered in McKenna’s lovably nasal voice would soon show up on tracks by Psychic TV, Coil, Youth, and the Orb, among other techno artists. One of the most lucid and enlightened authorities on the subject of drugs in the ’90s, he sadly died from brain cancer in April 2000.” -Jim de Rogatis

If you appreciate what the Terence McKenna Archives does and want to ensure that the acquisitions keep coming, please do consider donating or purchasing some items from our crowdfund. All proceeds go to support the further acquistion, preservation, storage, and sharing of Terence McKenna’s Legacy.