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Some listeners and writers of psychedelic music say that the music is not psychedelic anymore when there is emotion included. Others find it not psychedelic anymore if there are certain emotions for example "happyness" involved, but still find it psychedelic when the emotions are more on the negative side or the emotions are more "mystical".
I find the later kind of unlogic and inconsequent.
My idea of "psychedelic" music is more general. Psychedelic music is music which gives the listener the impression of interaction with the music. Music with an own mind so to speak. Psychedelic music even can bring the listener into a certain "trance" and therfore has the ability to lead the listener into himself or somewhere else, allowing amazing musical experiences, trips out and insides ones mind. This definition doesn't exclude any kind of emotion but demands something much more complex.
The majority of psychedelic music leaves out emotion. This is understandable since it offers many opportunities and due to leaving more doors open allows the listener more individual experiences. On the other hand including emotion into psychedelic music means to have more guidance and due to its increased concreteness offers stronger and deeper experiences as long the included emotions are genuine and deep enough. Therefore this demands a lot of frankness and responsibility in songwriting when it comes to strongly psychedelic music, since, putting the listener into a state of trance, it is possible to guide the listener into emotional corners so deep in himself, that it can even be difficult to get out alone. Overall the emotions unconditionally have to be genuine and deep-routed, cause in a state of trust and trance everything else would be very confusing. Hence, in my eyes, the writer of emotional, psychedelic music has to be very careful, has to offer complete trips, stories and has to bring the listener back to where he was. Just as a hypnotist has to wake you up after hypnosis.
In my experience it seems as if many writers of psychedelic trance are not aware of the power of emotion in combination with psychedelic song structures and work relatively irresponsible with emotions. Unsolved, unended stories or emotions, ungenuine emotions, surfacial emotions can be a problem since they (in case the listener was fully trusting the artist) can leave the listener in a, say, "displeasing" state. In combination with certain drugs this can even lead to bad trips. But mostly this leads to people just stopping to trust any emotion in psychedelic music, since they made unpleasant experiences.
This of course all applies to "normal" music as well, but the effect is much bigger in psychedelic music.
I do my best to write emotional, psychedelic songs, which take the listener to a beautiful or terrifiying trip into oneself but still bring everyone safe back home. Still: my experience is, that many listener either don't trust my songs in the first place or are just not willing to take what they show or even teach them.
In my eyes this is partly caused by too many artists irresponsibly creating "malfunctioning" emotional, psychedelic music and partly because people want to avoid the confronatation which emotional, psychedelic music offers. Psychedelic music can only "function" and "malfunction" when someone listens to it with all senses open. To protect from that, listeners start to close their senses by themselve or with senseclosing drugs.
I hope that artists making psychedelic music become more aware of the responsibility they have by making psychedelic music. Some think it's just fun, but psychedelic music is much more than that. It's a very complex form of art and it needs a lot of practice to offer responsible trips. Either the musician has to put the emotions "on hold", kind of "freeze" them to offer a rather open experience, or the musician has to be extra careful with the emotion (done with melodies) he involves.
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