Music has long been mythologised as something occult or supernatural. It cannot be seen or touched, yet profoundly affects our mood, physiology, and activities. Mythic bards like Orpheus embodied this occult power: his music both bewitching nature, and opening up the depths of the underworld. The motif of the musician as someone in close proximity to occult forces has persisted through the Romantic period, and into rock n roll, embodied in tales such as bluesman Robert Johnson reportedly selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads in Clarksdale Mississippi USA.
From the 1960s onward, this relationship between popular music, the occult, and the emerging counterculture came to the fore, coalescing into what Christopher Partridge (2013) has called ‘occulture’: our fascination with the occult, dark, romantic, and monstrous played out across the media-saturated cultures of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Most prominently, The Beatles placed occult figurehead Aleister Crowley on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, while Mick Jagger collaborated with avant-garde film-maker and Crowley-adherent Kenneth Anger, patronised the salons of esoteric cult known as the Process Church of Final Judgment, and released albums like the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967) and songs like ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ (1968). At a moment where stars like Robert Plant and Jim Morrison were considered shamans, and the Grateful Dead conducted crowds of thousands through the psychedelic experience, a new generation were tuned into the occultural dimension of music as potentially mind-expanding, spiritual, or magical experience divorced from the influence of mainstream religions.
The coining of the term ‘occulture’ is generally accredited to the musician, artist, and activist Genesis P Orridge, whose work effectively bridged late 60s psychedelia and the harder-edged, confrontational industrial music scene. Formerly of the band Throbbing Gristle, P-Orridge founded the magical cult Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. His band Psychic TV functioned as their musical propaganda wing, exploring how the samples, repetitive beats, and euphoria of acid house music could create altered states of consciousness or ‘gnosis’ in which magical effects could occur (Dines and Grimes 2021; Siepmann 2021). The legacy of TOPY, Psychic TV and other ‘post-industrial’ groups has influenced many other musicians who sought to encode occult influences into their musical productions and to use their music to create mind-altering and magical spaces. Examples might range from the ritualistic polyrhythmic rock of Tool, to the glacial dark ambience of Arktau Eos and Phurpa.
Rather than a conventional academic panel, this session will involve delegates participating in an experimental listening party of music designed to provoke the altered states explored by bands like Tool and Psychic TV. The session will conclude with a roundtable debate, including short talks from the panel members, and responsive contributions from the floor.
ORCID: 
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)