Magnetosphere: an art/pop internet screen music series

The Context

With the emergence of rock n’ roll in the 1950s came a new cultural form. Whilst it was always seen as a potentially radical form of expression, for many years it was seen as the music of youth culture – a form focused on the sensate and the immediate, whose purpose was to make people move and feel rather than think. In the 1960s, with the arrival of psychedelia and the protest movement, there was a shift in perception that this musical form was capable of communicating profound ideas and insight and that there was an intellectual/artistic tradition that was emerging from the ubiquitous form of popular music. This has been canonized in the work of George Martin and the Beatles, who fused compositional techniques (such as tape manipulations) from the experimental musique concrete tradition with popular music songwriting and production techniques. References to art were made consistently throughout the 1960s, most notably by bands such as the Velvet Underground, who had direct connections to the visual arts scene via their association with Andy Warhol and to the contemporary classical music scene via their association with the key avant garde figure LaMonte Young.

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