Are You Experienced

Are You Experienced is the debut studio album from the Jimi Hendrix Experience, built after former Animals bassist Chas Chandler spotted Hendrix playing Greenwich Village clubs in mid-1966 and brought him to London to front a new trio with Noel Redding on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums^[1]. Working on a shoestring budget, Hendrix and Chandler handled much of the pre-production out of the apartment they shared, then recorded the album in stages between October 1966 and April 1967 across De Lane Lea, CBS, and Olympic Sound Studios in London^[2].

Released in the UK on May 12, 1967, the album was kept out of the top spot only by the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and it arrived in the US that August to comparable acclaim^[2]. It became an instant touchstone of the psychedelic era, pairing blues and R&B foundations with a radically new vocabulary of guitar feedback, distortion, and studio effects^[2].

"Purple Haze," released as a single ahead of the album, was one of the clearest early signals of that new vocabulary, and it helped set the terms for how the rest of the record would be heard^[1].