Psychfest, at RecordBar this weekend, aims to expand your mind

When I ask Dedric Moore — who plays bass in local bands Monta At Odds and Gemini Revolution — how he came to found Psychfest, he doesn’t answer right away and looks a bit stumped. His eyes flicker briefly around the room at the Broadway Café, as though the answer might come from someone hunched over a mug a few tables away.

“When I was a kid,” Moore says at last, “I’d be walking by, and my dad would be listening to [Pink Floyd’s] Dark Side of the Moon on his headphones, and he’d be like, ‘Hey, come here! “On the Run” is going to come on!’ And he’d stop me, put the headphones and let me listen to it.” The psychedelic seed was planted. But it didn’t germinate right away. By the time Moore was in high school, in the early 1980s, he favored bands such as the Cure and Bauhaus — outfits you don’t usually picture on the psych family tree.

Moore heard something else, though. “It’s called ‘jumping down the rabbit hole,'” he says. “You find a band and you go, ‘Oh, they’re influenced by this,’ and then you’re going farther and farther and farther and you’re finding all these sorts of magical things that you had no idea were going on and you weren’t looking, and you tell your friend about it, and then suddenly you’re on eBay trying to find obscure records.”

Psychfest, the mostly local-music festival that Moore started in 2012 at the FOKL Center in Kansas City, Kansas, is its own distinctive rabbit hole. This weekend, the third-annual iteration of the festival comes to RecordBar, with a three-band preparty on Thursday and nearly 20 bands scheduled to play over Friday and Saturday. Though the fest recalls the organizer’s own journey from Pink Floyd to postpunk to psych, the bands he has assembled aren’t all what you’d call psychedelic.

“There are so many ideas of what is psych music, and I try to keep it wide-open,” he tells me. “If you look back into the ’60s, what people considered psychedelic — the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, even the Doors’ early stuff — today they’re considered classic rock or acid rock. They’re not psychedelic anymore. So I try to take a step back and look at it through that perspective.”

That means bands such as the Jorge Arana Trio — an experimental prog group that pulls from both jazz and krautrock — play alongside acts like Lawrence’s Your Friend and Akkilles, two groups that mostly skew folk.

This, Moore says, is the point.

“I want the night to flow so that every 30 minutes, you don’t know what you’re going to get,” he says. “I don’t want it to be one same-sounding band after another. Psychedelic music is supposed to be mind-expanding, and that’s what I try to think about: Is this band doing something interesting that is outside the norm of whatever genre they’re in?”

In fact, Moore’s slate for this evolving festival doesn’t have a weak link. That includes Moore’s own projects; after a brief hiatus, Monta At Odds is preparing to release a concept album in November, titled Robots of Munich. (Moore calls it “lo-fi Kraftwerkian songs with Latin beats” with a narrative that’s “kind of a sequel to Blade Runner.”) Gemini Revo­lution, which Moore fronts with his brother, Delaney, is a sort of electro-synth experiment studded with trippy little gemstones. The on-again Thee Water MoccaSins also perform, along with Minneapolis neo-psychedelic act Magic Castles.

Moore says the challenge isn’t finding enough acts for the festival. It’s narrowing down the list.

“We try to rotate the bands every year, so that if someone played two years in a row, they take a break,” he tells me. “But it also depends on what they’re doing — if a band has quality releases, and they’re really promoting what they’re doing all year and really staying active, if they’re consistently doing things, you know. The Conquerors are playing the third year in a row because they’re always busy, always out there promoting the scene.”

“Promoting the scene” is more or less how Moore sees his role with Psychfest. His main interest is getting a bunch of bands together for a good time and a little exposure — and having a good time himself.

“I won’t say I selfishly put Psychfest together for me,” Moore says with a laugh, “but there are these 20 bands, and I don’t have time to catch everybody’s sets. But you put everybody in one space for two days, and I get to hang out there and check out everybody’s stuff. That’s great. Of the two Psychfests so far, I think I’ve only missed two or three bands out of both years. I drink a lot of coffee and I’m there for the long haul.”

He goes on: “I want to see what everybody’s doing. It has to be a passion about music, to want to spend this many hours of your time just contacting bands and venues — the works. It’s not like it’s my day job, but it’s something I see worthwhile. There is a scene, and it needs to be nurtured. A lot of these bands are underappreciated, and I think if there’s a way to give them a forum and show their work, it’s the least I can do.”