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snowdrop

An interesting chapter on ambient music and spirituality, now available open access

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Hi fraggle friends ^.^

 

I thought this might be of interest to some of you - Professor Rupert Till, at Huddersfield University here in the UK, has made his chapter from the Bloomsbury Handbook for Religion  and Popular Music (ed.Christopher Partridge and Marcus Moberg, Bloomsbury: London) available to view for free on ResearchGate.

 

It includes a history of ambient music and its relationship with ancient forms of spirituality, mysticism and religion (i.e. meditation and ecstatic states), and most interestingly from my perspective he explores how ambient music has been positioned at the boundaries between the religious/spiritual and the secular.

 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318563122_Ambient_Music

 

If any of you find this interesting/enjoyable please let me know and I'll continue posting similar stuff as I come across it - and I'll be coming across more and more of it as I get further into my PhD :)

 

Big love and all good vibrations <3

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Thanks, I think I'll give it a try although it's rather long.

 

What other pieces are you planning to share? Can you name the titles or topics?

 

Btw, fraggle as in Fraggle Rock? :D

 

I don't have anything specific planned as I'm only now getting into the in depth search of literature directly related to the music and arts culture's I'm interested in (visionary and psychedelic). My search is based around the question "what might be understood as the 'politics' of visionary and psychedelic arts cultures?". This is tending to throw up stuff relating to psytrance and related genres as 'spiritual technologies' (as in the linked article); the idea of the psy festival as a 'carnival' of protest against dominant ways of making sense of the world; and the evolution of new ways of understanding the self, community and the wider world. Basically I propose to link to whatever open-access articles and resources I find that are relevant to the slower tempo genres and that seem like they might be of interest to the psybient.org community.

 

And yes, fraggle as in Fraggle Rock ;)

 

snowdrop,

thank you for link !

 

have you seen documentary "electronic awakening" ?

 

No probs Iurii, hoping that I'm over the worst of my period of illness and will now be able to connect more regularly with like-minded souls :)

 

Yes I've seen the documentary. I found it very interesting. It's a really accessible summary of a lot of the arguments I'm working with for my thesis, and even though it's obviously very America-centred, I think the themes it brings out are more or less universally applicable to psychedelic and visionary arts cultures. The only thing that doesn't really apply to my interests is the whole theta wave / entrainment thing, which I think is more of a psytrance phenomenon (though obviously the experience of collective ecstasy on the dancefloor is very strongly related to the kinds of ideas, themes, meanings etc that we find in psybass, psychill, etc).

 

I actually just finished reading another article which demonstrates the radical potential of online psy community forums (as opposed to groups on mainstream social media like facebook), which made me smile and think of psybient.org as I was reading it :) It's called Weaving the Underground Web: Neotribalism and Psytrance on Tribe.net, by Jenny Ryan.

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Way too short :)

 

 

If you stumble across other socio-musicological works, I'd be very interested.

 

Thanks for links, literature about downtempo is either too rare or hard to find ^^

 

 

By the way, reminds me of a book which was exploring how Ambient music strongly originated from modern classical music (Debussy, Satie once again, etc) but I can't remember the title... it was more about history of musical technics though, and less about the moral and philosophical approaches of the creators/listeners.

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Way too short :)

 

 

If you stumble across other socio-musicological works, I'd be very interested.

 

Thanks for links, literature about downtempo is either too rare or hard to find ^^

 

 

By the way, reminds me of a book which was exploring how Ambient music strongly originated from modern classical music (Debussy, Satie once again, etc) but I can't remember the title... it was more about history of musical technics though, and less about the moral and philosophical approaches of the creators/listeners.

 

You're very welcome ^.^ I will continue to post stuff as I come across it. I'll start a new thread for each I think. 

 

Was it this book that you'd seen, by any chance?

 

51l4tMBj8wL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

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