Elastic magazine is stretching psychedelia
When most people think about psychedelic art, they think about big, bright, trippy graphics, teeming with colours and seething maximalist textures. But for Hillary Brenhouse, editor-in-chief and publisher of Elastic magazine, that’s just a tired cliche.
“I’d begun to recognise that the ways in which we talk about psychedelia are just so incredibly narrow,” she explains. “I kept going to electronic music festivals and conferences and things that were purporting to show psychedelic art, and every time everything just looked the same to me.
“I’ve been really drawn to writing that plays with time, that plays with space, that sort of dissolves the imagined lines between genres, so that it’s not really fiction, not really non-fiction. And reading this really strange literature, it just made me feel like, some of this writing is a lot more evocative of the psychedelic experience than the art that I’m seeing on the walls.”
Inspired by her literary revelation, she started looking deeper into a new definition of the psychedelic, and enlisted the help of fellow editor Meara Sharma, who she met when the pair worked together on Guernica magazine.
“You tend to read a lot that feels similar, that sort of strikes a similar tone,” says Meara. “And I think I was excited about a project that was explicitly about work that feels different, that feels mind-expanding, whatever that might mean.”
Working with creative directors Chloe Scheffe and Natalie Shields, the pair created Elastic as a more subtly odd exploration of the psychedelic. As the strapline on the first issue puts it, “The ordinary, only slightly, weirdly, off”.
In this conversation the editors speak about the different ways in which they construct that weirdness throughout the magazine, using simple tools like repetition and blurred boundaries to create an immersive and distinctly unusual reading experience. The next issue is out next month, in April, and they promise that it’s even stranger than the first.
I hope you’ll enjoy this conversation with Hillary and Meara, and I hope you’ll seek out a copy of the second issue once it’s out in the world. If you’d like to hear more conversations with independent magazine makers, check our podcast archive for hundreds of hours worth of editors, designers and publishers speaking about what they do. And if you follow us on Spotify, or YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts, we’ll be able to deliver all our new episodes to you as soon as they’re ready.
