THREE TERMS I CAN no longer stomach: venerable, incendiary, and (for Christ's sake) space rock. The shoegazer kids around town have been calling themselves and each other space rock for a while now, and it must be stopped. Terrastock is not a space-rock festival, it is a psychedelic-rock festival. There will be no big, schticky space suits on stage, and no warbley, futuristic, Barbarella-style keyboard effects happening. Just stoners. Spacious, yes. It'll be spacy, even.

Terrastock is the annual event that long-running psychedelic-rock magazine Ptolemaic Terrascope has been staging since 1997, which will make Seattle the fourth city the magazine has chosen for the staging of its event. We, as a music-loving community, should be grateful for the opportunity to have so many great fucking bands descending from all over the globe upon the teensy Showbox this weekend. Terrastock runs for three days and boasts over 30 bands, all of whom are venerable, incendiary, and psychedelic.

When we say psychedelic, we have to clarify, as when we say anything. These are not hippie bands like the Grateful Dead--they are good bands, like Bardo Pond, Kinski, and, my personal wet dream, the Monkeywrench. The music such bands make is characterized by a will to distort the listener's perceptions, and alter their awareness to states that occasionally resemble psychosis. Pink Floyd, the Beatles, and then later, Spacemen 3 and their ilk, some of the less poppy stuff the Paisley Underground bands that came out of L.A. in the early '80s were doing, and Brit Pop bands such as Ride, the Verve, My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive are primarily responsible for psychedelic rock's more contemporary incarnations.

There's a lot to psychedelia, which is why Terrascope is a successful magazine. Fans of this kind of music are obsessive and geeky. Many of them take the drugs, and yes, many of them will have taken the drugs before attending the shows. Not that drugs are necessary. The Kinski/Voyager One show I attended a couple months ago was plenty stimulus for this musicgoer. They used visual projection for added effect, but the real high is in the music. If the reader is unaware of how stunning both of these local bands are, especially live (which is breathtaking in the case of both), then attendance at Terrastock is a very good idea. For 25 bucks a day or $75 for the entire three-day event, Terrastock is actually well worth the cost of admission. I broke it down. It comes to a little more than two dollars a band.

Aside from Voyager One and Kinski, highlights include the Monkeywrench, an eruption of blues and metal that had the Murder City Devils (or members of) pressed up against the stage, screaming and ecstatic at Bumbershoot. I, not a member of the Murder City Devils, was a bit farther back, a smile plastered on my face throughout the entire set as Mark Arm filled the room with his enormous voice and downright ballsy stage presence. Bands like the Monkeywrench have to be seen to be believed--all the more reason to be there Friday, the lineup of which also includes Japan's Ghost, who have been touring (and will be collaborating onstage) with Friday's headliners, Sub Pop snoozers Damon and Naomi. Wellwater Conspiracy, the Matt Cameron and Ben Shepherd (Sound-garden) project, will also be playing Friday to up the local superstar ante in a satisfying way.

Saturday brings us the Green Pajamas, the underrated psychedelic Seattle band that formed in '83 as a giddy response to the L.A. Paisley Underground movement. Also playing that night are Moe Tucker (former drummer for Velvet Underground, see Stranger Suggests this issue) and Scott McCaughey's the Minus 5, who just celebrated the release of a new CD this past month, and feature an ever-revolving team of players, known to include the likes of Peter Buck and Ken Stringfellow. If that isn't enough, Sunday will provide us with the Bevis Frond as headliners, the gorgeous project of Nick Saloman (founder of Ptolemaic Terrascope magazine), who plays guitar like a maniac and writes remarkably coherent pop songs for a man so prolific. Also, the aforementioned Kinski, psychedelic superstars Bardo Pond, and, apparently to keep the lineup real, as it were, Country Joe McDonald and the Frond-Fish--the '60s legend/ Woodstock veteran playing with Bevis Frond, which has happened before and will happen again. In fact, they have an album called Eat Flowers & Kiss Babies.

This festival promises to be sold out. There are too many good bands playing for it not to be. Though the Showbox is guaranteed to be packed and sweaty as hell, and the audience will most likely be full of stoned idiots, the music will make the night stomachable.