Sold Date: January 10, 2024
Start Date: January 10, 2024
Final Price: $450.00 (USD)
Seller Feedback: 236
Buyer Feedback: 764

This item is not for sale. Gripsweat is an archive of past sales and auctions, none of the items are available for purchase.

This is the Original pressing!!

There is NO Cover, just the paper sleeve.

Somewhere in Los Angeles in 1966 a group of musicians were dosing and recording while tripping.

The resulting recording–credited to “Underground 12” and considered the earliest known case of musicians recording while under the influence of LSD–was only available, as the legend goes, by mail order–, a plain red label with only an address: 12457 Ventura Blvd. in Studio City, CA. 

There’s nothing particularly groovy about this music. There’s no sitars, no fuzz pedals, no incense, no peppermints. There is, however, a lot of echo and delay, a lot of sped up tape (which in parts sounds a bit like ), plenty of atonal laughing, and welp, that’s about it for side one.

Side two is a bit better, with an actual piano played at normal speed, and an electric guitar soloing against it. This sounds a bit proggy, about five years ahead of its time. But then the producer (Bob Reed, is that you again?) starts speeding up the tape again.

Recorded at a time when psychedelic music did not yet exist as a genre, it is not surprising that the music flows freely across genres, from eerie Middle Eastern desert moods and nocturnal west-coast jazz grooves into full-blown acid-rock guitar soloing, while the hallucinogenic tension is sustained and released through outbursts of piercing Avant Garde, Fluxic chaos and minimalist stasis. Sold briefly via mail-order, the 1966 record was only rumored to exist until Lysergia's recent research verified its existence. In view of its pioneering historical status and outstanding musical quality.

However if the above sampler thrills you and you would like to own an original copy of this dubious classic by the Underground 12, it will set you back $666. 

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