This weekend, the fifth annual Austin Psych Fest kicks off in Austin, TX. Hosted annually by The Black Angels, the festival displays a wide array of psychedelic acts over three days in intimate indoor settings. This year, the Austin Psych Fest welcomes some of the top acts on the scene, including Brian Jonestown Massacre, Woods, Dead Meadow, Thee Oh Sees, Black Lips, Wooden Shjips, Olivia Tremor Control and many more. While preparing to get this year’s festival underway, Black Angels vocalist Alex Maas took the time to speak with us about the rapidly expanding festival and the growing contemporary psych movement.

The Austin Psych Fest is now in its fifth year. Can you talk about how you first came up with the idea for the festival and what the inspiration was for it?

One of the main reasons why we’re doing the festival is because there wasn’t a festival in Austin that brought our favorite artists. You have ACL and South by Southwest, but those are just insanely big and you can’t see the bands you want to see. Through all the years of touring, we’ve met tons of amazing artists that we want to tour with or that we’ve seen and this is just our chance to bring them all to Austin and show Austin what’s happening in the psychedelic music scene, which is growing tremendously. There’s tons of different types of genres of psych. Basically, it’s just a chance for us to bring all of these artists together and present a festival that showcases all of them.

At first it just started out as this one day thing during SXSW, then tons of people started showing up to it. Then the next year, we did it again and people started flying in from out of state and out of the country and we were like “woah, maybe people would want to come to this thing for a couple of days?” So that’s how it started and it’s kind of taken off from there. We’re still fairly small at this point, but it’s started to take on a life of its own.

How many attendees are you expecting this year?

We’re expecting 2,000 a day. So 6,000 total over the whole weekend, maybe a little bit more. Each year we’ve been slowly growing the festival. We haven’t had a crazy huge spurt in growth, but at the same time if you look at the genre, it’s slowly been inclining in terms of popularity. We talk about how everything is cyclical. Everything in psychedelic music is cyclical—every 20 years or so it comes back around. And who knows how long this will last, but now with so many people really expanding their sound the potential of the genre can really grow. It’s just a matter of how many people want to refer to their sound in that way.

I read somewhere once that “psychedelic” is the most misleading term used to describe music.

It totally is. And actually, it’s to the benefit of the genre that it’s misleading. Any style of music can be referred to as that. But if you go back to the first elements of psychedelic rock and roll, that has a certain sound. It’s very unmistakable. It’s got a certain sound. But it’s misleading and, for a while there, it was also deterring people from getting into it. People just didn’t take these artists seriously, or they thought they were all about drugs and that’s just not true. The music should take you there. And that’s kind of the whole misconception as well, that there’s this whole culture behind it. I know tons of people in psychedelic bands that are creating this sound and they’re completely straight and sober people who have never done anything in their entire lives. It has less to do with that and more to do with the sound that they’re creating – how the music is making the people feel.

You mentioned the cyclicality of the psych genre. I’ve read that psychedelic music often comes around, specifically, during war times or times of disaster and conflict – which we are definitely living in now. What are your feelings about the reasons behind this current psychedelic revival and it’s continuing growth?

I would totally agree. Art is always reflecting the political climate and the climate that’s happening, whether it’s a complete opposite reaction or whether it’s with it. I definitely think that the scarier things get, the more turmoil, the more chaos, the lack of information, the lack of truth given to the public, the lack of care from the public to search for the truth, and people being blind to what’s happening around them creates a kind of fear and it’s not just in the music scene. I think that all kinds of art are reflecting the state of society, and always have. What are some new aspects of this year’s festival that you are particularly excited about?

Well, last year we did the festival on this beautiful power plant. It was this 1950’s art deco power plant and it was a super awesome venue – it was really cool and really awesome looking – but the sound wasn’t that good. Being in a big warehouse like that and having two stages, there’s a lot of bleed and tons of echo, which was cool, but this year the people coming are going to hear these amazing bands in an environment that sounds really good. There’s two venues and you can walk between them and each one has its own vibe. I’m really excited about hearing all of these bands in an environment that’s conducive to their sound. That’s probably what I’m most excited about.

Do you guys do all of the booking yourselves?

We ask people what they want to hear, so we’re communicating with people who are coming to the festival. We have bands that we like, but we don’t know every band. It’s impossible. So through asking the community, you’re getting this poll method and we’re pulling from what the community wants. We want to be the festival that shows you music you’ve never heard before, but at the same time, we want people to have a hand in picking these bands.

To close out the festival you guys have Golden Dawn performing their 1968 album Power Plant in its entirety. How did you manage to make that happen?

Part of our goal for this festival is to hit every single style within the psychedelic genre – which is kind of difficult because you have surf-psych, folk-psych, electronic music, rock and roll and garage psych. But we always want to have a vintage element. Last year we had Roky Erickson and this year we have Golden Dawn. They put out a record in ‘68 called Power Plant, and its just this record that never got the credibility and attention it deserved. So they’re from Austin and they were playing with the Elevators back in the day. We basically just asked them if they would play and they actually did play Psych Fest #2 a long time ago. So this is us bringing them back and we made sure they got a good time spot. They’re just a band that everyone needs to know about. They’re one of the vintage acts playing the festival.

Can you name some bands playing the festival this year that you are particularly excited to see?

Obviously I’m really looking forward to seeing Brian Jonestown Massacre, they’ve really got their act together and they’re playing really well. Also, Black Lips. I’m also really excited about seeing a band, who we toured with, called Wall of Death – they’re from France. There’s another band called Blue Angel Lounge and there’s a guy called Bombino, he comes from the same north African dessert community as Tinariwen. I’m really excited to see him play. I could say things about every single band. They’re all really, really good. I’m just stoked to be a part of this. It’s kind of a dream come true.