In an era in which ‘psychedelia’ can often mean merely a grab-bag of influences from which wah-wah pedals and two-note riffs are dispensed as signifiers and signposts into a realm of easy accessibility as opposed to gateways to another dimension, it can be a rarity to come across a band who are genuinely fixated on creating alternate realities for the listener. Yet this is exactly how Stockholm’s Josefin Öhrn + The Liberation view their incandescent art, and it’s this sensibility that’s led to the kaleidoscopic spendour of their debut full-length for Rocket Recordings, ‘Horse Dance’.

“I drifted into music, spending more and more time alone in huge cities and out by the ocean, inside of sound, mumbling, gradually addicted to repetition and monotony to get to grips with this deepening despair where everyone around me seemed obsessed with redecorating their little cabins on a sinking ship.

I do what it takes to remain in the periphery of this collective breakdown that passes for sanity or reality. I mumble to myself as a kind of psychedelic incantation for protection against the materialistic psychosis that’s seeped in to our very cells and become the manifest that orders our every thought and sentiment.

But there’s a lot of hope, since an open and wild state of mind is always accessible from anywhere. More easily in peripheries, to me at least.”
– Josefin