If you believe everything you read (elsewhere, that is), you'd think modern pop is simply a cot blanket intended to pacify the masses. Fortunately, there are still true believers in music's potential for enlightenment. One such acolyte is Eddington Howard of Oddience, an LA-based, acid-laced outfit currently gathering giddy plaudits with their floaty, sunshine-powered, semi-improvised take on hip-hop.

"Music taught me to be a free-thinker," says Howard. "It's taught me how to groove, to go with the flow. Overall, music has taught me to be."

Oddience are part of a group of musicians who are deploying psychedelic philosophies in new territories. Sonically, these artists have little in common – after all, unlike, say, dubstep's infrasonic bass, psychedelia doesn't have a signature sound that can be easily appropriated with a Logic preset. What they share is a desire to expand their consciousnesses. This usually means gleefully dumping the conventions of their nominal host genre. Electric Youth, for example, had a narrow escape from chillwave, but their recent track The Best Thing sounds like a lost pop anthem. Kilo Kish, meanwhile, mix psychedelic singer-songwriter stylings with hip-hop urgency and, as on new single Navy, kitchen-sink observations about the celestial nature of humanity.

At its best, this correspondence school of music weaves the boundaries of house, hip-hop, R&B and miscellaneous electronica into a Venn diagram of genres resembling a Technicolor Spirograph spiderweb. It's at the heart of the avant-garde soul of Shabazz Palaces collaborators TheeSatisfaction, whose deceptively catchy awE naturalE album conceals a multitude of shape-shifts. It's the keystone of Flying Lotus's relatively restrained new album, Until the Quiet Comes, notable for reining his sprawling abstract funk into tunes you can almost whistle.

And it's central to the aesthetic of Seth Troxler, feted techno DJ, producer and linchpin of the Visionquest label collective, whose music is yet to find a sound it hasn't assimilated. Troxler's love of psychedelia is lavishly expressed on his Resident Advisor podcast, which skipped barefoot from Pink Floyd to hyphy rappers Dem Hoodstarz, while still making perfect thematic sense (his more recent Essential Mix for Radio 1, with Jamie Jones, is also a treat). Troxler's curiosity encompasses all aspects of the psychedelic experience, with a particular focus on the power of pattern recognition on consciousness. To explore this, his productions, and DJ sets, contain specific, evolving rhythmic patterns intended to induce a trance-like experience in the listener.

Visionquest was famously born out of a communal acid trip shared by the label's founders, and the group now plan to make manifest their vision through a series of events held in "explorative" environments, augmented with music to try to open the attendees' pineal eyes.

Troxler says they hope to encourage a wave of similar "large, spiritual events, rather than just having raves and festivals, which are kind of bullshit at the moment. People aren't pushing the boundaries. And if people don't push those boundaries, people forget that there are boundaries to be pushed. Where will that leave us in 50 or 100 years? Is it something that will be lost?"

"The music seemed to tell its story quite clearly," says Cyriak. "It's a journey from naive simplicity to complex discord and back again, with a transformation at the end. The basic sounds and repetitive nature of the main theme suggested something mechanical and yet childlike, so from there I had the subject, style and storyline I needed: a cartoon robot world whose perfect balance is upset, resulting in destruction that in turn creates something new."

Similarly, LA's Oddience wowed the music nerdsphere with their recent mini-movie Lit Lava Lamp, which cuts their trippy, cloud-headed tracks, Homeboy Palm Tree, The Dew and Goldblum into a "tramedy" about four isolated individuals sharing the same moment that may or may not be the end of the world. "Where we live is a crazy place," says Howard. "You can create your own reality, because it's a paradise, so it can be whatever you want it to be. You can be this unhappy person in this beautiful, sick, shiny city, but at the same time that's an idea you've missed in your own mind.Once you really open yourself up and look around, this place is nuts – it's got perfect weather, it's got every fuckin' geographical environment, there's always something to do. I think that mix comes across in the music."

Although psychedelia is more commonly associated with skinny white boys with Boris Johnson hair and a borrowed sitar, many of its greatest achievements come from the worlds of soul, funk and jazz, whether it's the endtimes social surrealism of Funkadelic's Maggot Brain, the evolutionary introspection of Stevie Wonder's Innervisions or the embryonic-electronic generalised freakout of Miles Davis's On the Corner. Howard refuses to self-identify as a psych artist yet he cites this seam as a key influence. "A lot of the ideas that came out of psychedelia were about peace and love, the connection between human beings, and sharing human experience," he says. "I feel like a lot of our lyrics, as well as the melodies, definitely go along with the psychedelic idea. I really believe in higher learning, speaking your mind, connecting with other people. Psychedelia will teach you a lot in terms of living."

Peace, love and empathy aside, psychedelia was once viewed as a potential instrument of revolution during the civil rights era in the US: in 1971 vice-president Spiro Agnew personally intervened to block the release of Eugene McDaniels's Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse, believing it would inspire mass riots. It's not that surprising he wasn't a fan – aside from that album's incendiary lyrics, psychedelia encourages its fans to question their beliefs. Troxler enthuses that this particular element changed his life for ever.

"You can see the correlation between the music that people listen to and also the ideas that they represent in their everyday lives," he says. "That's something that I think is profound about psychedelia. If you listen to experimental music, your perception of life is also more open. It's about finding that self within, and then when you do, you're much more able to create yourself in the outer world.'

Quite aside from the acid and general bohemianism inherent in the scene, psychedelia encourages listeners to view existence more objectively, taking other personal perspectives into account. Troxler likens this process to hallucinogen - and ritual music-assisted initiation rites prevalent in many civilisations from the Americas and Africa, in which the passage to adulthood is marked by a great epiphany. "With the music, or anything else, it's about giving the opportunity to realise that we are conscious beings," he says. "In many ways I think that is the point of our existence."

For his part, Troxler sees employing music's transformative power almost as a social responsibility, suggesting that the commercial neutering of music is mirrored by a societal drift away from mass political engagement.

"It's a weird situation – you want to challenge but you want to entertain. But not to challenge is a lost opportunity for influencing people. Once you go within, then you can stand up and say something. But if you don't, you live in this brainwashed lollipop world where it's easier to just be in a coma and take things as they are. People who are into more challenging psychedelic music challenge life itself, and that's where we make progress. Rather than in America, being like a sheep, where you're told, 'this is not just what it is, but also what it can be'. When you've had the psychedelic experience," concludes Troxler, "the curtain in some way is dropped."

Seth Troxler plays the Warehouse Project, Manchester, on Saturday 29 September.