Brian Barritt
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Brian Barritt
Brian Sydney Barritt (1934–2011) was an English author, artist, and counterculture figure. He served in the British army, and was a friend and collaborator to such notables as Timothy Leary, William Burroughs, and Alex Trocchi. He was particularly active in the Beatnik, psychedelic, and Krautrock scenes. Books Barritt was the author of several books, including ''Whisper'', ''The Road of Excess: A Psychedelic Autobiography'' and ''The Nabob of Bombasta''. He also collaborated with Timothy Leary on his book, ''Confessions of a Hope Fiend''. Relationship to Timothy Leary Barritt first made contact with Leary when Leary was on the run after his escape from prison. Barritt wrote to Leary in Algeria, asking him to write a foreword to the then unpublished, ''Whisper''. Leary had seen parts of the book before which had been handed to him whilst he was a prisoner at San Luis Obispo, USA. By the time Leary received his letter, Barritt was already in Algiers waiting to see him. Their ...
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Coventry
Coventry ( or ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, city in the West Midlands (county), West Midlands, England. It is on the River Sherbourne. Coventry has been a large settlement for centuries, although it was not founded and given its city status until the Middle Ages. The city is governed by Coventry City Council. Historic counties of England, Formerly part of Warwickshire until 1451, Coventry had a population of 345,328 at the 2021 census, making it the tenth largest city in England and the 12th largest in the United Kingdom. It is the second largest city in the West Midlands (region), West Midlands region, after Birmingham, from which it is separated by an area of Green belt (United Kingdom), green belt known as the Meriden Gap, and the third largest in the wider Midlands after Birmingham and Leicester. The city is part of a larger conurbation known as the Coventry and Bedworth Urban Area, which in 2021 had a population of 389,603. Coventry is east-south-east of ...
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Counterculture
A counterculture is a culture whose values and norms of behavior differ substantially from those of mainstream society, sometimes diametrically opposed to mainstream cultural mores.Eric Donald Hirsch. ''The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy''. Houghton Mifflin. . (1993) p. 419. "Members of a cultural protest that began in the U.S. In the 1960s and Europe before fading in the 1970s... fundamentally a cultural rather than a Protest, political protest." A countercultural movement expresses the ethos and aspirations of a specific population during a well-defined era. When oppositional forces reach Critical mass (sociodynamics), critical mass, countercultures can trigger dramatic cultural changes. Prominent examples of countercultures in the Western world include the Levellers (1645–1650), Bohemianism (1850–1910), the more fragmentary counterculture of the Beat Generation (1944–1964), followed by the globalized counterculture of the 1960s (1964–1974). Definition and characteris ...
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Timothy Leary
Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist and author known for his strong advocacy of psychedelic drugs. Evaluations of Leary are polarized, ranging from bold oracle to publicity hound. He was "a hero of American consciousness", according to Allen Ginsberg, and Tom Robbins called him a "brave neuronaut". As a clinical psychologist at Harvard University, Leary founded the Harvard Psilocybin Project after a revealing experience with magic mushrooms in Mexico. He led the Project from 1960 to 1962, testing the therapeutic effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin, which were legal in the U.S., in the Concord Prison Experiment and the Marsh Chapel Experiment. Other Harvard faculty questioned his research's scientific legitimacy and ethics because he took psychedelics along with his subjects and allegedly pressured students to join in. One of Leary's students, Robert Thurman, has denied that Leary pressured unwilling studen ...
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William Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II (; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist, widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature.Stevens, Matthew Levi (2014). The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs. Mandrake of Oxford. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, and five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences; he was initially briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and created and exhibited thousands of visual artworks, including his celebrated "Shotgun Art". Burroughs was born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri. He was a grandson of inventor William Seward Burroughs I, who founded the Burroughs Corporation, and a ...
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Alex Trocchi
Alexander Whitelaw Robertson Trocchi ( ; 30 July 1925 – 15 April 1984) was a Scottish novelist. Early life and career Trocchi was born in Glasgow to Alfred (formerly Alfredo) Trocchi, a music-hall performer of Italian parentage, and Annie (née Robertson), who ran a boarding house and died of food poisoning when Trocchi was a teenager. He attended Hillhead High School in the city and Cally House School in Gatehouse of Fleet, having been evacuated there during World War II.Sammaddra (16 December 2013)"The Edwin Morgan Papers: Alexander Trocchi – ‘cosmonaut of inner space’" ''University of Glasgow Library Blog''. Retrieved 2 December 2021. After working as a seaman on the Murmansk convoys, he studied English Literature and Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, graduating with second-class honours in 1950. Without graduating, Trocchi obtained a travelling grant that enabled him to relocate to continental Europe. In the early 1950s he lived in Paris and edite ...
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Beat Generation
The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generationers in the 1950s, better known as Beatniks. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration. Allen Ginsberg's ''Howl'' (1956), William S. Burroughs' ''Naked Lunch'' (1959), and Jack Kerouac's ''On the Road'' (1957) are among the best known examples of Beat literature.Charters (1992) ''The Portable Beat Reader''. Both ''Howl'' and ''Naked Lunch'' were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize publishing in the United States.Ann Charters, ''int ...
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Psychedelia
Psychedelia refers to the psychedelic subculture of the 1960s and the psychedelic experience. This includes psychedelic art, psychedelic music and style of dress during that era. This was primarily generated by people who used psychedelic drugs such as LSD, mescaline (found in peyote) and psilocybin (found in magic mushrooms) and also non-users who were participants and aficionados of this subculture. Psychedelic art and music typically recreate or reflect the experience of altered consciousness. Psychedelic art uses highly distorted, surreal visuals, bright colors and full spectrums and animation (including cartoons) to evoke, convey, or enhance the psychedelic experience. Psychedelic music uses distorted electric guitar, Indian music elements such as the sitar, tabla, electronic effects, sound effects and reverb, and elaborate studio effects, such as playing tapes backwards or panning the music from one side to another. A psychedelic experience is characterized b ...
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Krautrock
Krautrock (also called , German for ) is a broad genre of experimental rock Experimental rock, also called avant-rock, is a subgenre of rock music that pushes the boundaries of common composition and performance technique or which experiments with the basic elements of the genre. Artists aim to liberate and innovate, with ... that developed in West Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s among artists who blended elements of psychedelic rock, avant-garde music, avant-garde composition, and electronic music, among other eclectic sources. These artists incorporated hypnotic rhythms, extended musical improvisation, improvisation, musique concrète techniques, and early synthesizers, while generally moving away from the rhythm & blues roots and song structure found in traditional Anglo-American rock music. Prominent groups associated with the krautrock label included Neu!, Can (band), Can, Faust (band), Faust, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Cluster (band), Cluster, Ash Ra Tempel, Pop ...
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Flashbacks (book)
''Flashbacks: A Personal and Cultural History of an Era'' is Timothy Leary's autobiography, published in 1983. It was reprinted in 1990 and 1997. The new edition has a foreword by William S. Burroughs, and a new afterword by Leary. A double cassette album which contains Leary reading selections of ''Flashbacks'' was published under the same name in 1989 by Dove Books on Tape, Inc. Publishing details ''Flashbacks'' was published by Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc., Los Angeles, on May 1, 1983 (hardcover, ). It was reprinted in 1990 by Tarcher (paperback, ), and reprinted by Tarcher again in 1997 (paperback, ). Reception The celebrity doctor Andrew Weil described the book as having, '...solid information about the psychedelic revolution of the Sixties' while the psychiatrist Rick Strassman Rick Strassman is an American clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. He has held a fellowship in clinical psychopharmacology research at the Univ ...
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Martin Glover
Martin Glover (born 27 December 1960), better known by his stage name Youth, is a British record producer and musician, best known as a founding member and bassist of the rock band Killing Joke. He is also a member of the Fireman, along with Paul McCartney. Early career Martin Glover was born on 27 December 1960 in Slough, at that point part of Buckinghamshire, England. He attended Kingham Hill School, an independent private school in Oxfordshire, where he met Alex Paterson, who would become a roadie for Glover's band Killing Joke, and later founder of The Orb. Naming himself "Youth" after the roots reggae Rastafari chanter Big Youth, in 1977 he joined punk rock band the Rage, who toured with the Adverts. Later he joined "4 Be 2", a band formed by John Lydon's brother Jimmy Lydon, and recorded the "One of the Lads" single with them. Youth was the bass player in Killing Joke but left the band in 1982 and soon after founded his own commercially orientated dub funk band B ...
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Killing Joke
Killing Joke are an English rock music, rock band from Notting Hill, London, England, formed in 1979 by Jaz Coleman (vocals, keyboards), Paul Ferguson (drums), Geordie Walker (guitar) and Youth (musician), Youth (bass). Their first album, ''Killing Joke (1980 album), Killing Joke'', was released in 1980. After the release of ''Revelations (Killing Joke), Revelations'' in 1982, bassist Youth was replaced by Paul Raven (musician), Paul Raven. The band achieved mainstream success in 1985 with both the album ''Night Time (album), Night Time'' and the single "Love Like Blood (song), Love Like Blood". The band's musical style emerged from the post-punk scene, but stood out due to their heavier approach, and has been cited as a key influence on industrial rock. Their style evolved over many years, at times incorporating elements of gothic rock, synth-pop and electronic music, often baring Walker's prominent guitar and Coleman's "savagely strident vocals". Killing Joke have influenced ...
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The Orb
The Orb are an English electronic music group founded in 1988 by Alex Paterson and Jimmy Cauty. Known for their psychedelic sound, the Orb developed a cult following among clubbers "coming down" from drug-induced highs. Their influential 1991 debut album ''The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld'' pioneered the UK's nascent ambient house movement, while its UK chart-topping follow-up ''U.F.Orb'' represented the genre's commercial peak. Beginning as ambient and dub DJs in London, The Orb's early performances were inspired by electronic artists of the 1970s, most notably Brian Eno, Cluster, and Kraftwerk. The Orb have maintained their signature science fiction aesthetic despite numerous personnel changes, including the departure of Cauty and members Kris Weston, Andy Falconer, Simon Phillips, Nick Burton, and Andy Hughes. Paterson has been the only permanent member, continuing to work as the Orb with Swiss-German producer Thomas Fehlmann, and later, with Martin "Youth ...
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