Kimberley Jane Anderson

Kimberley Jane Anderson’s PhD thesis explores the spiritually transformative potential of progressive rock. She draws on responses to a qualitative fan survey, her own, situated aesthetic analysis, and phenomenological accounts of imaginative experience. Recently she has explored utopian and spiritual elements in The Dark Side of the Moon, using autoethnographically informed aesthetic analysis. She has also served as theological advisor to a composer and a poet in two separate creative projects, publishing reflections on each collaboration as Theological Action Research. Previously, she specialised in early modern poetry and drama.  She currently works on her PhD part time while parenting a small child in St Andrews, Scotland.

“Evoking and Traversing Elsewheres”: Places and Spaces in Progressive Music

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Kimberley Jane Anderson

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Owen Coggins’s award winning qualitative study on drone metal identifies important aspects of listening experiences which relate to “mysticism, ritual and religion”. Crucially, this includes the creation of heightened and alternative places and spaces as key to the spiritually evocative experience in this genre. “Progressive rock” has also been identified as “utopian”, “aquarian” and “escapist” (Macan, Martin, McDonald), yet there is not a comparable study into fans’ spiritual experiences.

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The proposed paper draws on results from a 2018 survey to identify an unsurprising, yet marked commonality between “utopian and transformative” listening experiences among fans of “progressive rock”, and the themes identified by Coggins regarding drone metal reception. Three particular ways will be outlined, in which utopian elements manifest in progressive listening experiences: (1) the physical, “thisworldly” scene of musical consumption, often carefully and consciously delineated by fans and/or producers as an “other” place, (2) diverse kinds of other places to which fans are guided in consuming the music, whether through a specific lyrical and musical “story” or through more indirect physical effects of sustained listening, and (3) the types of transformation, both short and long term, effected by the music for its listeners by this musical sojourning. Particular critical attention will be paid to the positivity of these “utopias”, their general (though not unanimous) identification as ideal places rather than the more literal definition of a utopia as a “no-place”. Recognising the limitations of this survey - its online-only existence, shorter duration, and confinement to discretely worded questions - I will also reflect on a notable contrast from Coggins’s findings, in fan willingness to identify the musical experience more definitely as “religious” or “spiritual”, and (in some cases) to reflect sustainedly on this relationship.

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Keywords: qualitative research, progressive rock, drone metal, utopian experience, re- enchantment, spirituality, transformation, identity