Simian Podcasts

In this podcast, music theorist Chris Cutler charts the artist Iannis Xenakis’ path from architectural forms to stochastic music, tracing a life shaped by war, exile, and radical creativity. The episode accompanies an exhibition at Simian, presenting La Légende d’Eer, Xenakis’ seminal composition from 1977 as a spatial installation, restored and remastered from the original tapes. The transcript with footnotes can be found here:https://tinyurl.com/lalegendedeertranscript

In the fifth and final episode of Mood Curriculum, Kristian Vistrup Madsen meets Saskia Vogel to discuss her translation of Peter Cornell's Ways of Paradise (Fitzcarraldo, 2024). Cornell, who passed away earlier this year, first published the conceptual novel in Swedish in 1987. It presents as the footnotes to a lost manuscript, but what transpires from reading is that searching for ways to paradise will always mean circling the perimeter of a lost object.

In episode four of Mood Curriculum, Kristian Vistrup Madsen is in conversation with Rosanna McLaughlin about her essay Against Morality (Floating Opera Press, 2025). For McLaughlin, morality has become an unconstructive benchmark in art that strips it of its power along with its vitality.

In the third episode of Mood Curriculum, Kristian Vistrup Madsen speaks with philosopher Simon Critchley about his book On Mysticism (NYRB, 2024). With On Mysticism Critchley offers a roadmap to mystical practice and thought within the Christian tradition. He understands mystical experience as experience in its most intense form – mysticism is mediated immediacy. It is an antidote to melancholy, as Julian of Norwich puts it, "to the heaviness with which the self is attached to itself, riveted to itself. " It is also a call to intensify the senses: "God is all mouth", he quotes from Madame Guyon, and a movement away from the self: to write, in the words of Annie Dillard, "without a face". Music by bitsy Knox and Roger 3000. Cover art by Tolia Astakhishvili.

In the second episode of Mood Curriculum, I speak with poet Ariana Reines about her book Wave of Blood (Divided, 2024), in which the native properties of poetry are harnessed to reckon with an acute real life crisis during the first months of the war in Gaza. In Wave of Blood there is real grief and anger; it is a challenging and very personal work. It opens with a quote from the poet and painter Etel Adnan that reads: "Science must not replace pain, because when that kind of catastrophe happens, it has no mercy." Music by bitsy Knox and Roger 3000. Cover art by Tolia Astakhishvili.