Bad LSD Trips: Ultrafest LP

Doris Dana & Domingo Castillo Flores invert and short-circuit EDM festival tropes in a heavily trippy follow-up to their cult tape of ’22, still loosely aligned to the etheric rave detachment/derangement of The Automatics Group, Leyland Kirby, Lee Gamble or Teresa Winter.

An ephemeral notion of Florida rave is in properly elusive effect within the smeared fractals of ‘ultrafest’, marking the 2nd batch of potent goods by Bad LSD Trips for prolific label, enmossed. Putative qualities of ketamine, acid, MDMA and more rarified letters and numbers are evoked in a lush series of events where traces of original synthesis elide field recordings and sampledelic collage.

In the process, BLT explore a vein of interest that has gripped a certain section of the experimental electronic psyche for a good while now, seeping out in various forms that all seek to emulate the sensation of post-rave recollection and nostalgic reverie, replete with bittersweet ephemera and the quease of hedonism. However they’re generally from UK or EU, and Bad LSD Trips infuse and distinguish their take on that sound with a certain something of the US experience, held up in light of its contrasts between cheesy/glam Miami sleaze-feats and more niche subcultural junctures that fed into the global IDM electronica rhizome.

Expect a sound perhaps subtly more Tim Hecker and 0PN than Leyland Kirby or Lee Gamble, as the album sweeps from the melancholic thizz and ringing fractals of ‘sabotage dream’ to the windswept choral dimensions of ‘aventura sonidera’, via highlights in the k-holing dubstep echoes of ‘vacuum sacrifice’, skin-tingling otherworldliness of a ‘steaming mescaline’ like Malibu really feeling herself, and spiralling vortices of ‘estado liquido.’