Here’s something weird and appropriately trippy from Wiltshire producer DJ Emma, celebrating the invention of LSD – or, to be specific, the world’s first acid trip.
It celebrates Bicycle Day, an annual event which commemorates LSD inventor Albert Hofmann’s famous cycle ride in Basel 70 years ago under the influence of his psychoactive creation.
The Swiss scientist had actually come up with the formula five years earlier while searching for a psychiatric tool that might help with research into the human brain. He never dreamed it would one day become a recreational drug responsible a quarter of a century later for a great deal of terrible music – nor that his wild ride would become commemorated as Bicycle Day.
Three days after taking an accidental dose, and feeling the need to delve deeper, on the afternoon of 19 April 1943 Hofmann, ingested 0.25 milligrams (250 micrograms) of his new drug, purely in the interests of science. An hour or two later, when he began to experience changes in his perception, he asked his laboratory assistant to accompany him on his six-mile cycle ride home in case of an accident.
During his literal acid trip – the term “trip” was not invented until US scientists came up with it during trials in the 1950s – Hofmann’s condition rapidly deteriorated as he struggled with feelings of anxiety caused by the drug he had created.
He became convinced that his next-door neighbour was a malevolent witch, that he was going insane, and that the LSD had poisoned him. When a doctor arrived, however, he could detect no physical abnormalities save for a pair of widely dilated pupils. Hofmann was reassured, and soon his terror began to give way to a sense of wild pleasure.
As he put it in his memoir LSD: My Problem Child, “Little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colours and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in coloured fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux.”
You probably won’t manage that just by listening to this but you can try.