Various Artists - Brown Acid: The Seventh Trip

What would be a variation for the “Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t” saying that would be specific to music? It is something yet to be figured out, but it would certainly be something to be used for the Brown Acid: The Seventh Trip compilation, or for any of the other six in the series. Actually, it would come in quite handy for any such compilation of obscure singles from mid-Sixties to Mid-Seventies era that covers any genre from garage to proto-heavy genres, encompassing any trace of psychedelia in them.

At the time when they were originally released, the chance of running into a single that would suit your taste was like buying a lottery ticket - no information in the printed music press, the record shop attendants had no time or chance to listen to but a fraction of them, and unless a radio DJ stumbled upon, or was directed to play one, and by chance you heard them, they were gone in a flash. And it seems that between then and now, most of the singles were a replacement for a frisbee you misplaced somewhere.

Now? Sure you have a chance to hear them anywhere - streaming services, YouTube, files… The problem is that there are so many you still need good luck to hit the one you want or need. And in the case of those old obscure singles, somebody has to find them first.

The Brown Acid series, like the similar Nuggets and Pebbles series, are there to do that job. Now running into its seventh edition, they concentrate on guitar-driven, and often fuzz-leaden sound that performed the link between ‘pure’ psychedelia (if such a thing exists) and all form of heavier sounds. The presented singles are usually so obscure, that if you by a chance in a million already have one of these, you can now sell the original and buy an additional ‘new’ record collection for the money.

Of course, besides the renowned series like the Nuggets and Pebbles, there were and will be many other attempts to collect these sounds, but the reason why Brown Acid can be mentioned in the same breath with these two lies in four facts - they make the best selection they possibly can, they try to clean the sound and bring it as much as possible to today's standards, they try to make some sort of logic in the sequencing of songs and they annotate them properly.

So, along with every fan’s tendency to play a music historian as much as they can, they can actually enjoy listening to these artifacts they may have read something about in some obscure footnotes, of course, if the heavier side of fuzzed-up psych or any psych for that matter is their thing.