The Psychedelic Ensemble is a one man band who chooses to remain anonymous, with the only outside collaboration being with Janos Marton and Alexandra Serban, who together with the artist, carefully selected images produced by artists at the Living Museum as imagery for the album. The project came about some years ago, starting after the artist stumbled on an article in The New York Times about an exhibition featuring art from the Living Museum, a center devoted to artistic production by patients at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, New York. Then in the summer of 2008,an NPR interview with psychiatrist and Living Museum curator, Janos Marton struck a chord that brought about the conception of the opening of The Art of Madness: I think that creativity, and artistic production, is almost a symptom of mental illness. From there the album was written and recorded over 3 months in 2008.