After the orgy of distortion delivered by dream-pop and shoegazing, restoring a bit of discipline to the genre became a legitimate desideratum in the USA.

One of New York's most creative minds of the 1980s was Mark Kramer (11), a studio maverick with a flair for bizarre arrangements. After playing country music for the new-wave audience with guitar improviser Eugene Chadbourne in Shockabilly, best immortalized on Earth Vs (1983), and recording an album of demented folk a` la Fugs, Happiness Finally Comes To Them (1987), with multi-instrumentalist Ralph Carney (ex-Tin Huey) and singer Daved Hild (ex-Girls), Kramer formed B.A.L.L. with Don Fleming, and Bongwater (12) with the performance artist (and future television actress) Ann Magnuson. Bongwater's masterpiece, Double Bummer (1988), was born at the confluence of Kramer's dadaistic tape manipulation and Magnuson's psychoanalytical monologues, with a touch of free-jazz and a lot of retro` passion. Leaving behind the wild experimentation of that post-modernist monolith, Bongwater retreated to a simpler, gentler, catchier form of eccentric pop on Too Much Sleep (1989), not too unlike the Jefferson Airplane circa 1967. If The Power Of Pussy (1991), a concept on the social value of sex, replete with hyper-realist vignettes of urban angst drenched into claustrophobic atmospheres, belonged more to Magnuson than to Kramer, The Big Sell-Out (1992) was Kramer's nostalgic tribute to the hippie civilization. But his entire, prolific and multiform career, was only a prelude to Kramer's colossus, The Guilt Trip (1993), a tragicomic and ostensibly autobiographical postmodernist treatise. Whether sung or instrumental, Kramer's pieces were studio-virtuoso efforts. The amount of sonic events constituted a maze of sidetracks and detours in which the very meaning of music disappeared. It was emotional collapse due to information overload. Throughout the album, a logorrheic guitar libido seemed to be Kramer's real voice, but stifled by the hyper-active montage that churned out music like an assembly line. Despite all the artifice, the whole also retained the quality of a social fresco a` la Who's Tommy. It was, de facto, Kramer's final testament.

The greatest and craziest disciples of classic Pink Floyd came out of Oklahoma: the Flaming Lips (14), whose art bridged the punk ethos and the hippie burlesque. Their aesthetics was in many ways derived by cartoons: shapes that were grossly naive and easily identifiable, stereotyped characters that bordered on parodies, simplified and often implausible situations. Hear It Is (1986) was fundamentally still rooted in punk-rock and garage-rock, with overdoses of Stooges and the Velvet Underground (but already with a respectful attitude towards the song format). But other songs harked back to Syd Barrett's oblique lullabies, Neil Young's guitar neurosis and Jim Morrison's melodramatic eloquence. The band was equally versatile in the soft and the hard registers, and it proved it with the semiotic cauldron of Oh My Gawd (1987), a post-modernist masterpiece. The arrangements were creative to the point of being grotesque, while abrasive rock'n'roll crescendos, psychotic singalongs and transcendent dirges seemed to fuel each other to ever higher levels of unorthodoxy. Telepathic Surgery (1989) reached a demented level of stylistic collage, particularly with the monumental piece Hell's Angel's Cracker Factory. The streamlined sound of In A Priest Driven Ambulance (1990) and Hit To Death In The Future Head (1992) relied on catchy melodies and sound effects in the tradition of early Pink Floyd, but marked the first retreat into conventional formats. Dreamy litanies and surreal ditties became typical of less and less adventurous albums: Transmissions From The Satellite Heart (1993), Clouds Taste Metallic (1995) and The Soft Bulletin (1999). The notable exception was Zaireeka (1997), a set of four discs to be played simultaneously on four different players.

Another surreal take on Pink Floyd's earlier sound was offered by another wildly creative Los Angeles outfit, the Red Temple Spirits (11). The extravagant mysticism of Dancing To Restore An Eclipsed Moon (1988) had few or no precedents. It rehashed emotional debris left buried under the cosmic and ritualistic hymn of Interstellar Overdrive, under the psychotic and metaphysical melodrama of The End, under the apocalyptic frenzy of Sister Ray, while scouring medieval fairy tales, Tibetan mantras, whirling sufi dances and gothic ballads for intimations of supernatural existence. The lighter If Tomorrow I Were Leaving For Lhasa (1989) was the charming and graceful appendix to that ponderous masterpiece.

Detroit's Viv Akauldren (1), featuring keyboardist Keir McDonald, added an odd blend of ambient, progressive and world-music to the psychedelic trips of I'll Call You Sometime (1987).

Towards the end of the decade in the USA, psychedelic rock mutated into a whole new genre, less involved with studio trickery and/or guitar mayhem, more focused on songwriting while still preoccupied with textures and soundscapes. The lead was taken by Boston's Galaxie 500 and New Jersey's Yo La Tengo, perhaps the two bands that would be most influential on the following decade.

Galaxie 500 (12), comprised of guitarist Dean Wareham, bassist Naomi Yang and and drummer Damon Krukowski, went against the trend when they created an anti-theatrical style devoted to urban alienation. Today (1988) was a moonlit tide of languid litanies and whispered singalongs. It was expressionism turned upside down: angst and terror, but in the form of a bloodless stupor, not a loud scream. The trio played back the third Velvet Underground album, Pink Floyd's Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun and Television's Torn Curtain, but filtered of any residual vitality. On Fire (1989), their most personal work, was an existential anesthetic. There were echoes of the (acid-rock) past but they were ethereal, sleepy, ghostly: they had been reduced to an inner language of the subconscious. The setting was a wasteland roamed by zombies devoid of any passion, resigned to their emotional impotence and moral isolation, capable only of articulating the emptiness of their lives in a vocabulary of negative words. These were confessions of people who did not even know anymore how to grieve for their own sorrow. These dirges were the exact opposite of the anthemic call to arms of rock'n'roll. An excessive trance dazzled the acid jams of This Is Our Music (1990), the most ambitious but also terminal leg of their "trip". Parting ways with Wareham, the former rhythm section of Galaxie 500, Yang and Krukowski assumed the moniker Damon & Naomi (1) and recorded More Sad Hits (1992), whose gentle breeze was the ideal appendix to Galaxie 500's mission.

Yo La Tengo (13), the project of Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, exploited a more obvious synthesis of classic styles. Ride The Tiger (1986) "rode" Television's transcendent guitar trance, the finger-picking of country music, the tremolo of psychedelic-rock, the exuberant riffs of instrumental surf bands, and so forth. New Wave Hot Dogs (1987) and President (1989) failed to capitalize on that synthesis, but May I Sing With Me (1992), their boldest sonic experiment, coined a personal language of abstract ballads and moody textures. Each song was an exercise in balance: balance between action and meditation, between rebellion and fatalism, between nonchalance and poignancy. Painful (1993) formalized the aesthetics ("shoegazing" drones and simple melodies) behind that philosophy. Despite the lack of novel ideas, the duo could chisel impeccable songs: the mystical feeling that permeated Electr-O-Pura (1995), and the intricate and eclectic I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One (1997), that casually blended jazz, industrial, dissonant and Indian elements, led to the pure abstraction of And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out (2000), but also to the classical eclecticism of I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass (2006).

In the age of hardcore punk-rock, the aesthetics of Phish (22), a quintet based in Vermont, bordered on the suicidal. Nonetheless, the band became one of the most significant phenomena of the decade. Phish focused on the live concert, a concept that had been anathema during the 1980s, and rediscovered the guitar solo, the ornate keyboard arrangements, prog-rock tempo shifts, group improvisation and the whole vocabulary of intellectual hippie music, as proven with the lengthy tracks on the cassette Junta (1988). The encyclopedic tour de force of Lawn Boy (1990) focused on mostly-instrumental melodic fantasies that quoted from an endless list of genres. Guitarist Trey Anastasio inherited Frank Zappa's clownish compositional style, which blended rock, jazz and classical music in pseudo-orchestral fashion, while his cohorts inherited Grateful Dead's dizzy jamming style, and keyboardist Page McConnell added a strong and elegant jazz accent. Their art of stylistic montage peaked with A Picture Of Nectar (1992). Its kaleidoscopic suites balanced the melodic center of mass and the centrifugal forces of the instrumental parts, while surfing through an impressive catalog of styles, juxtaposing kitsch sources (exotica, lounge, easy-listening, doo-wop) and chamber duets or jazz solos. The smoother and slicker sound of Hoist (1994) closed the epic phase and opened the commercial one in the lighter vein of the Band, the Doobie Brothers, Little Feat and the Allman Brothers. Phish, the first creative group to be completely indifferent to the punk aesthetics, had just changed the world.