V.A. The Trip. Psychedelic Music from the Hippie Trail. Pt. 1/4 - From Italy to Turkey

Behind the Scene...

To my surprise, Klaus, a record dealer at the Leopoldplatz fleamarket in Berlin, knew about Anatolian Rock when I told him about the Bosporus Brigdes compilations. He told me that, in his hippie days in the beginning of the 1970s, he had hitchhiked to Istanbul to make his way from the Pudding Shop Café to the Far East.
That is how the idea was born to re-create a soundtrack for the Hippie Trail, the trail of the psychedelic hippies from Europe to Asia. The result: a series of four 12” records, called “The Trip”. What could the travellers have heard back in the days? Especially: which previously unknown sorts of music, combining Western and Eastern elements and thus establishing new styles of pop music?
For some years now, thanks to many re-releases of some labels interested in historical developments, pop music history tends to be re-mapped. Instead of focusing on a tiny number of old centers, a new multipolar view has emerged: besides the classics of the Anglo-American realm, other pop music styles, which combine local and global elements, have been given more attention. Pop music history is one thing, hybrid pop music history another. For sure the latter cannot be thought without the impulses of Anglo-American pop music, nevertheless it is a music of its own kind, being more and more considered and recognized as such due to the growing influence of post-colonial ways of thinking.
The series of “The Trip” shares this line of thinking. The trip starts in Italy with almost familiar sounding rock music, and travelling from there to the East, to less well-known shores of familiar-unfamiliar hybrid music, due to the mixes of global with local elements. What it so special about it, is the exceptional musical versatility, which characterizes the musical modernity in non-Western countries.

Holger Lund, curator of the series “The Trip”