It is acceptable these days to describe Blake as a Taoist, a Pagan, a Buddhist or an atheist... anything but a Christian. The Traveller and his guest, Mark Vernon argue that this is a big mistake: "Blake... did not claim to be a mystic, and did not use the word. He claimed to be a visionary, an enthusiast, and a Christian, and defined the terms carefully. I have read, and now am reading in newspapers, statements of literary critics and those who call themselves "atheistic theologians" to the effect that Blake had no god but man. People who are not atheists are usually willing to leave to God such important judgments about others. On this subject, as on other statements about himself, Blake seems clear enough. He said always and passionately that he was a Christian, and I know only One who has a better right to an opinion on that subject." Bo Lindberg

Planned as a long Q&A session between Andy and long-time Traveller podcast co-host, Conor Kostick, that discussion raised so many questions and went on for so long that it seemed best to postpone airing the issues on the podcast. For this episode we excerpted Andy’s intro to the discussion, touching on his own experience listening to and making electronic music.

Starting with Wendy Carlos and Popcorn, (yes, it’s Hot Butter by Popcorn, not Popcorn by Hot Butter… Andy got that wrong throughout) passing through Kraftwerk, David Bowie, Throbbing Gristle and Nurse With Wound, Andy argues that the technology is generally used lazily and to little effect, compared to the enormity of, eg., the work of Iancu Dumitrescu.

The gist of Andy’s argument is that all the things he found interesting in the distorted timbres and extremities of electronic rock and industrial music are used with overwhelming effect in the music of the Romanian Spectral composer, Iancu Dumitrescu, whose music runs throughout the show, along with samples from David Bowie, Throbbing Gristle, the Tim Hodgkinson / Ken Hyder collaboration, KSpace, and Andy Wilson’s own recorded archives.

Along the way, Andy discusses the combined and uneven development of electronic music, with huge increases in the expressive power of the tools available to musicians still lagrely unexplored by most musicians. Yes, Andy is complaining about the music young people make today. Conor thought so, and he might be right.

Andy also tells stories about visiting abandoned quarries on a military base to record foxes with Chris Watson of Cabaret Voltaire, Cod that burp (off the Galapagos Islands, not Japan) at hissing cockroaches, Chris Carter’s Gristleizer, Bourbonese Qualk’s Simon Crab buying Throbbing Gristle’s Korg MS20, comparisons between buying tickets for Oasis and dumping grain in the Pacific, seagull reverb, the Nagra tape recorder, BBC Radiophonics, ‘Dada, Futurism, Industrial Music’, Wendy Carlos, hand-cranked ring modulators, The Aphex Twin and the Supercollider user group, Steve Stapleton bunking off at Faust’s Wumme and Kurt Graupner’s Faust Machines, computerised shamanic improv, John Lennon’s tape experiments, SoundRaider, time division multiplexing, nature recording with David Attenborough, the pleasures of dentistry under general anaesthetics, and more besides.

Criminally, I didn’t get around to talking about how the sound of King Iwah and the Upsetters’ Give Me Power, produced by Lee Perry in 1972, set the scene for everything that followed. I can only apologise and drop this video here.

Traveller Music Tech

Blake saw imagination as the ‘body of Christ’, as divine: imagination is what will build Golgonooza, his New Jerusalem. Some readers of Blake interpret this imagination as merely the power that drives the artist to make inspired art. It is far more than this in Blake. The imagination is tasked with building God’s Kingdom itself. But what can this mean?

Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997) was a child of the post-war revolutionary movement. He led the group Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism), which split to the left of French Trotskyism and was active from 1948-1966. Castoriadis eventually rejected Marxism, based on his belief in the power of the collective social imaginary to create social forms (languages, institutions, social relations), symbolic artefacts and entire societies. Could this social imaginary, able to create ex nihilo and overturn all categories, be the divine body of the imagination Blake envisioned?

In this podcast, Andy Wilson talks to Joe Ruffell about Castoriadis and the imagination, taking in topics including;

* Castoriadis’s political history and his development beyond Marxismthe role of imagination in Blake

* Castoriadis’s account of the history of the concept of the radical (esemplastic) imagination from Aristotle to Heidegger and beyond

* Castoriadis and Primary Narcissism

* State Capitalist groups to the left of Trotskyism in the New Left

* worker’s power against Lenin and Taylorism

* the later Castoriadis’s idea of the interregnum, and of the power of the imagination to entrap and beguile

* Castoriadis’s ecological and anti-oppression politics

* Castoriadis and imagination against Marxism

* the debate between Castoriadis and Alasdair MacIntyre (the latter speaking for the International Socialists before becoming a Catholic Aristotelian)

* democracy in the Greek polis and elsewhere

* the curse of the imagination

Does the radical duality of Castoriadis’s imagination – its power both to liberate and enslave, and the slippery dialectics between those states – resemble in any way the arrangements in Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell?