Magic has been drained out of history by the historians. Gordon White

Magic has been drained out of history by the historians. Gordon White

There has been a fundamental omission in the telling of the past, not just our past history but also in the way that we understand music, and that is the role of magic. It is difficult for us to reconnect with the fundamental belief in magic that our predecessors had, it was infused in everything that they did and by extension music and art was a magical connection with the other world.

Without reinserting that fundamental belief in magic and the supernatural back into history it is impossible to fully understand why or how people thought. We also have to respect those people and not just come out of our colonial Western modern thinking and all its pomposity that we have the answers, because we obviously do not. So with a little bit of humility we can see that our ancestors’ belief and the use of magical ritual and spiritual practices gave rise to incredible innovations in art and technology. For us our focus is what that thinking did regarding music.

Music and art were used to invoke and evoke states of consciousness and they knew that. Their definitions of how these things happened would be different from ours, as we will explain them in psychological terminology. But anybody who is a student of Carl Jung will understand that psychology is really only a cipher for magical thinking. Evidenced by the red book.

I would say that today music is disconnected from this otherness, it has little or no inner energy, this is why root styles of music frequently come back into the popular music arena and re-energise music, disguised as rock and roll, punk or grunge and there is something innately visceral and otherworldly about those sorts of animal.

One thing that could be said about modern pop music is there is nothing really magical about it. It is so computerised and quantised that any essence of energy has been removed and replaced by something sterile. However if the computer becomes the servant and not the master the essence of the DJ producer can be bound into the songs, dance is a good example of this. I think the deciding point here is, were any risks taken? Producing a song by a Rihanna or a Katy Perry maybe more a case of not getting it wrong than getting it right because of the big budgets involved.

We find it very difficult to be able to think in a mediaeval style, because we have been told that many of the things they believed are rubbish, but obviously they did not think that. If however you ask yourself the question ‘why ritualistic behaviour and magic systems seem to have been unchanged over a period of 2000 years, why keep doing something that does not work? The logical answer to that is, it did. but is only us that have rid ourselves of the magical tools from the toolbox.

I am suggesting that by looking back at styles that may influence us musically and getting to the root of what it is that drives it we can reconnect with what the music is all about and derive something from it for ourselves, if only to reanimate the music that we play.

You do not have to believe in magic and the supernatural; only suspend your disbelief to unlock the unconscious. I would suggest listening to musical styles such as Blues or Flamenco or the English folk music tradition and see what sort of weirdness you can find in there; Mojo’s, Dances of the spider, impossible tasks asked of ex-lovers etc. Pull on that thread a little and see where it takes you.

Then maybe off to the crossroads to talk to Old Nick.