VARIOUS ARTISTS – Up In My Mind series (Vol.1, Vol.2, Vol.3, LP, Mushroom Cloud Records)

♠ Up In My Mind: 15 Fuzzed Out Acid Tabs From The Lysergic Sixties

♠  Up In My Mind Vol. 2: 17 More Fuzzed Out Acid Tabs From the Lysergic ’60s & Early ’70s

♠ Up In My Mind Vol. 3: Even More Fuzzed Out Acid Tabs From The Lysergic ’60s

Some compilations document a scene. Others try to explain it.
Up In My Mind does neither.
It summons it.

This ongoing series from Mushroom Cloud Records is less a historical exercise and more a lysergic transmission straight from the cracked underbelly of the ’60s and early ’70s — a time when fuzz pedals were cheap, reality was optional, and teenage bands pressed singles that sounded like they’d been recorded in a garage, a basement, or a bad trip. Drawing from obscure U.S. and Canadian acts, unreleased tapes, forgotten 7″s, and long-vanished compilations, Up In My Mind taps directly into that raw, hallucinatory nerve where garage rock, acid psych, and outsider ambition collide.

There’s a clear lineage here: the unofficial psych and garage compilations of the ’80s and ’90s that circulated hand-to-hand, whispered about in record fairs and late-night radio shows. But this isn’t nostalgia cosplay. These records are curated with intent — no fillers, no polite revisions, only killers. Every track is chosen for maximum mind-warp potential, every side sequenced to feel like a descent rather than a playlist.

Volumes 1 through 3 (Volume 1 has just been repressed on 300 copies, by the way) play like fragments of the same delirious notebook: blown-out fuzz riffs, primitive drum patterns, echo-soaked vocals, and melodies that sound one step removed from falling apart entirely. It’s psychedelic music before the term was sanitized — music made by people who didn’t know the rules, didn’t care to learn them, and probably wouldn’t remember them anyway.

With Volume 4 already looming and Volume 5 promised after summer, Up In My Mind is shaping up to be less a series and more a slow-burn manifesto: a reminder that the strangest, wildest, and most human sounds of the psychedelic era were often pressed in tiny numbers, ignored by history, and waiting decades for the right needle to drop.

Drop it carefully.
Or don’t.

A MindTrip to original Psychedelia. Enter your own risk and nothing would be the same anymore… TimeLord Michalis

Tracklist Up In My Mind

Tracklist Up In My Mind Vol.2

Tracklist Up In My Mind Vol.3

Links

Listen/Trip/Buy through MUSHROOM CLOUD Bandcamp