Paper short abstract:

How new electronic musical technologies were used as technologies of the self in contemporary Esotericism

Paper long abstract:

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate through an analysis of a number of relevant cases, including early electronic music, krautrock, avant-garde, industrial and techno how innovative electronic musical technologies emerging in the 1960s and 1970s from an early point prompted new developments in esotericism and spirituality and equally became technologies of the self for a number of new occultural movements. The moog synthesiser along with other electronic technologies literally became more than musical elements. Such technologies fused with individual agency were integrated as ways and means by which 'the true self', 'expanded consciousness' and 'the occult' could be discovered, expressed, and constructed though associated practices, including ritual, meditation and dance. The paper argues that the rise of electronic musical technologies coupled with technologies of the self has led to innovative transformations of esotericism and spirituality the past 50 years and that such transformations, which overstep traditional boundaries and fields–flooding into the arts—need to be taken more fully into account in order to gain a better picture of historical transformations of contemporary esotericism.