This week, one of the most popular of all Goa trance tracks: Hallucinogen’s LSD, first issued as a Dragonfly single and then on the legendary Order Odonata compilation in 1994, a year before his ‘Twisted’ album was released on the same label.

Simon Posford had been working as an engineer at Youth’s Butterfly Studios in Brixton, London, lending his skills to artists such as The Infinity Project in their groundbreaking tracks (as discussed last week). He had been making music under the project name Purple Om and made his first track as Hallucinogen in 1993 (an early mix of Solstice, later issued on Flying Rhino’s ‘Retrodelica’ compilation), when he made his early mix of LSD (first released in 2014 on Dat Records’s compilation Analog Dreams). As Simon recounted to me, Dragonfly “had cut the vinyl and were pressuring me for a band name (“within the next ten minutes, please”). I couldn’t think of anything but since the track was called LSD (because of the samples), I went with the name Hallucinogen purely because it seemed appropriate for the track, totally oblivious that I would ever produce another tune under that moniker, let alone that it would provide me with a career. If I’d known this, I would have put some more thought into the name!”

This track raised the musical and engineering bar of what was possible, much as The Infinity Project had the same year, with mysterious sonorities, transparent layering of musical lines, a wide array of synth sounds, and strong rhythmic momentum. Particularly notable in Posford’s output is a very personal harmonic framework, and in this track there are multi-octave arpeggiated sequences and a catchy broken-chord riff, punctuated by a laser-like zapping synth sound and soaring, sweeping ‘whooshes’. It was a big favourite on the dance floors at the time, and after its vinyl and compilation release it was little surprise that this was the opening track of the first Hallucinogen album ‘Twisted’ (which came with a sticker on it that humourously stated ‘Contains LSD’) in 1995: 

While this is a track that for many came to define the new emerging Goa sound, it is worth noting that Simon’s sound was truly his own (though there are clear influences of TIP, Pink Floyd, Eat Static, and Ozric Tentacles)- that the Goa movement was one that featured a wide range of harmonic and structural elements, and that it was really the fact that Posford was employing these to express his vision so well that makes his music so representative of the growing movement of the time.

For those interested in comparing the 1994 release with the first mix from a year earlier, here is the track Simon called LSD ’93 as released for the first time on DAT Records over twenty years later:

Groundbreaking music of the highest order!