Golden State Psychedelia / Various

2015 collection. Some of the earliest releases in Big Beat's Nuggets From The Golden State series were based around the output of top San Francisco recording facility, Golden State Recorders. The latest installment in the series, Golden State Psychedelia, continues to celebrate the studio's legacy, restoring material from deleted volumes as well as exhuming more psychedelic gems from the GSR vault. Aside from rare singles by the Tow-Away Zone and Seventh Dawn, Golden State Psychedelia is comprised wholly of material that went unreleased, though not for reasons of musical quality. As studio boss and producer Leo Kulka said, the sheer volume of acts in the San Francisco of the era meant pitching material to labels became increasingly difficult. Nevertheless, Kulka gave bands a professional home in which to record, and the contents of Golden State Psychedelia, all recorded between 1966 and 1970, reflect the freaky, experimental flavor of the times. Highlights include the commercial pop-psych styling of the Bristol Boxkite, Carnival and Ticket Agents, the punkadelic Goody Box and Immediate Family, and some truly outrageous studio experiments by Magician and the Gants. The package comes with the usual copious notes one expects of the Nuggets series, and will delight any aficionado of late `60s arcane West Coast psychedelia.