The Brian Jonestown Massacre: Sonic Cults, Chaos, and Beautiful Noise

If rock music were a dusty thrift store full of forgotten gems, broken radios, velvet jackets, and acid-stained notebooks, then The Brian Jonestown Massacre would be the slightly unhinged shopkeeper handing you a tambourine and inviting you to a séance behind the curtain.

Founded in the early ‘90s by the infamous Anton Newcombe, BJM didn’t just form a band — they summoned a swirling, psychotropic entity. The name alone is a mischievous mashup of The Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones and the Jonestown tragedy — equal parts homage, irony, and warning label. It’s the kind of moniker that says, we’re here to blow your mind, and possibly our own in the process.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre sounds like time folding in on itself.
Think jangling 12-strings from 1967. Think droning sitars, tape hiss, tambourines, Velvet Underground sneers, shoegaze fuzz, and lyrics like transmissions from a parallel universe where Syd Barrett never left Pink Floyd but got way into Eastern mysticism and dub reverb.

Their early albums — Methodrone, Their Satanic Majesties’ Second Request, and Take It from the Man! — are kaleidoscopic opuses of retro-future garage psychedelia. Anton wasn’t just channeling the ’60s; he was building an alternate version of it. One where the Summer of Love never ended, but everyone got more cynical and the drugs got weirder.

BJM wasn’t just a band — it was a cult, a commune, a war zone.
Their story was beautifully, tragically, and hilariously captured in the 2004 documentary Dig!, where we watched Anton simultaneously create transcendent music and detonate every bridge within a 5-mile radius. Fistfights on stage? Check. Screaming about artistic purity mid-set? Oh, absolutely. Kicking bandmates out mid-tour? Routine.

But here’s the thing: the chaos was part of the art.
Anton Newcombe isn’t playing to win Grammys. He’s playing to pierce the veil. He’s a mad scientist in a Berlin lab (literally — he moved there), experimenting with frequencies, drones, and drugs of the auditory kind. He treats recording like spellcasting, layering sounds until the air gets heavy with mood. His Bandcamp is a treasure trove of sonic experiments, singles, bootlegs, B-sides, and full-blown epics.

And still, somehow, The Brian Jonestown Massacre remains prolific — 20+ albums deep and counting. Each one is a new spellbook: sometimes dreamy, sometimes abrasive, always unmistakably BJM. There’s no nostalgia here; just perpetual reincarnation. They are psychedelia’s cockroach, too wired to die, too weird to stop.

Anton once said: “I want to make music that’s interesting in 100 years.”
And honestly? He might. Because while trends come and go, while Spotify algorithms pump out endless beige-core playlists, BJM is still in the basement with a reel-to-reel, making strange, beautiful, alive noise.

So light some incense. Drop the needle. Let your third eye dilate.
BJM isn’t for casual listening. It’s for time travel, ego death, and maybe punching your own reflection while a tambourine rattles in the background.

Get in. Tune out. Massacre your expectations.

🎸🌀💊

—MadWonko (currently floating three inches above the floor with headphones on backwards)