“What does acid feel like?” This question hangs over lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) – a substance more controversial, more maligned, and more iconic than perhaps any other psychedelic. Yet it remains an experience known to remarkably few, with recent research suggesting only around 5% of the population has ever encountered it.

First synthesized by Swiss pharmaceutical chemist Albert Hoffman in 1938, LSD’s psychedelic properties weren’t discovered until Hoffman’s inadvertent heroic dose in 1943. The 1950s saw research blossom, exploring both therapeutic benefits and more sinister applications – notably the CIA’s infamous MKUltra program. By the 1960s, championed by figures like Timothy Leary with his mantra to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” acid became the chemical catalyst for a cultural revolution, symbolizing spiritual exploration, creative expression, and political rebellion. Free love, free politics, free people, free peace.

LSD belongs to the category of classical psychedelics alongside psilocybin, DMT, and mescaline – substances that induce profound changes in thought patterns, self-awareness, and sensory experience. These compounds, along with MDMA (an empathogen) and ketamine (a dissociative), occupy a contradictory position in our collective consciousness. They’re simultaneously viewed as dangerous drugs and powerful medicines.

Modern research, driven by pioneers like the late Roland Griffiths, has revealed extraordinary potential in treating notoriously resistant mental health conditions – depression, PTSD, alcoholism, and anxiety. As mental illness proliferates, and few efficacious treatments seem available, psychedelics represents a compelling avenue to explore.

While clinical studies can quantify therapeutic outcomes, they tell us little about the subjective experience itself. Most people remain largely ignorant of what it actually LSD actually feels like, their perceptions shaped instead by cartoonish cinematic representations, or by snippets and vignettes communicated in language ill-equipped for conveying such intricate experiences.

We certainly should not be putting acid in the water supply. It is a substance that demands nuance, caution, and reverence. So how can we generate a greater understanding of the subjective experience of LSD?

Music remains one of life’s most intangible mysteries. Unlike other art forms – books, paintings, film – music permeates deeply into our consciousness. There is a removal of any sense of perceiver and object, instead arising a feeling of co-emergence. Music cannot located anywhere – the picture is there, the film is there – but instead is inextricable from waking experience.

This profound interweaving of acid and artistry reaches back to LSD’s cultural dawn. From the Beatles to Pink Floyd, from the Grateful Dead’s legendary acid tests to Jimi Hendrix’s electric revelations, musicians have long turned to LSD as both muse and medium. The 1960s and 70s saw entire genres birth themselves from this chemical communion – psychedelic rock, acid jazz, space rock – each attempting to translate the ineffable experience into sound.

These weren’t merely songs about LSD; they were sonic attempts to capture its essence, to reconstruct its reality-bending properties through wavelength and rhythm.

This artistic alchemy continues to reverberate through modern music. Contemporary artists have used increasingly sophisticated production techniques to manifest their acid-influenced visions.

In both eras, the goal remains remarkably similar: to transmute the private, subjective experience of psychedelic consciousness into a shared auditory journey. To answer that persistent question, “What does acid feel like?” not with words, but with sound itself.

Over the coming days and weeks, I’ll be publishing a three-part series, titled “Love, Lucy, and Lysergic Lakes: The Soundscape of LSD.”

Featuring the music of Kenny Rogers, The Beatles, A$AP Rocky, Courtney Barnett and many more, each piece will feature a deep dive into three songs that explore this fascinating and elusive substance. Of course, I cannot entirely reduce the ungraspable majesty of these songs into words, hence why encouragement of hearing them will be foregrounded.

Yet there is profound value in trying to verbalise ineffable experience. I love reading film and music reviews, hearing someone encapsulate in language the indelible qualities I had always adored about such art. I will strive to do just that through this series, while hoping also to explore, with you, what the subjective experiences of LSD are like beyond the stereotypes and caricatures.

While words may ultimately fall short of capturing the full dimensionality of either acid or music, this series aims to illuminate the fascinating intersection where they meet – that liminal space where artists have translated their psychedelic journeys into sound, and in doing so, have created some of the most compelling music in modern history.

Join me, as we dive into these sonic landscapes, seeking to understand not just the music itself, but the extraordinary states of consciousness that inspired it.