Here comes psychedelic rock from Denmark – Account from The Mind Flowers’concert (16.08.2014, CafeRetro, Copenhagen)



Account from The Mind Flowers’concertEvery day in December is perfect time to recall summer adventures (it doesn’t matter if you’ve already started dreaming about fabulous winter holidays) and it’s also time to pay your debts. So let’s try to remember together the best things that happened to us this summer and do as much as we can.

If you are going to travel around North Europe (at any time) and while you are not planning to visit any particular concert, you can be nearly hundred percent sure that a concert will find you itself without any special attempts of yours. And be sure, it will be a good one.
Our report is just about such a concert that found us by chance on the very first day of our time in Copenhagen.

There is a very nice and cozy caf? with a simple name Retro (though it has so many additional meanings) in this red-roofed city. And right here, in the center of Copenhagen, just the day we arrived there, came a show of one local band called The Mind Flowers.

The guys were fixing their equipment, checking the sound for a long time trying their best to make it ideal. We were patiently and impatiently waiting, and as time was flying our curiosity was increasing. The caf? was getting noisier & more crowded (mostly because of musicians’ friends).

There is something so innocent and at the same time anxious when you are going to hear a band for the very first time. Will you likeit? Will the world arising from this music be similar with yours? Our minds were full of such questions while we were waiting for The Mind Flowers to start this mystery.

And here is the universum we heard.

The Mind Flowers is an interpretation of psychedelic practices of Pink Floyd at Syd Barret’s time and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, acid-bacchanalia by The Doors and ground-breaking blues-rock of Jimi Hendrix through the prism of modern anti-bourgeois intellectualism and Scandinavian estrangement. Reverberation and tremolo effects, mysterious noises accompanied by lyrics appealing to “take a trip to the center of your mind”will evoke nostalgia in the experienced mind. And it will be his nostalgia for the sound of avant-garde rock music of 1960s.

Though the band’s concert sound is minimalistic in a Scandinavian way. It consists of three classical components: solo-guitar, bass and drums. The meditative recursivity of Japanese Hills is to be replaced by assertive ‘garage’ retro of Down the Line. And this looks like it came just from late 60s–early 70s through a spatiotemporal portal. And then it happens that this overwhelming mixture of ultimatism and detachment captures the listeners of Cafe Retro’s hall, brings them all to a shuttling movement. All this phantasmagoria wouldn't release the audience until the last accords of the final song.

Music historians noticed long ago that remarkable and forward-looking appearance, once depleted at any time, will revive itself at some time in the future, it will certainly be brought to life and developed but in new conditions. And if the saying about dialectical evolution of musical history and history in general is true, then the appearance of an evident psychedelic rock band like The Mind Flowers isn’t an accident. And it’s them who can fight against crisis stroke present diminishing rock scene in the new century.

Text – Sergei Panin and Irina Panina
Photo – Irina Panina