Warning! This podcast contains modern art, the aestheto-apocalyptic consummation of the material world, and Bert Thicknesse. This time, Critical Mash tells you everything you need to know about expressionism, Kandinsky, Schoenberg, synaesthesia … and how the world would be brought to orgasmic destruction by art and music! Our fearless hosts, Robert Thicknesse, Lucy Lethbridge, and Yehuda Shapiro return for a mind bending and spirit expanding episode of Critical Mash.

They are joined by Natalia Sidlina, lead curator of the Tate Modern exhibition Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider, and international curator at Tate Modern, and by Gerard McBurney, composer, writer, teacher, presenter and polymath.

In our second episode of our new arts podcast, our hosts dare to take on Expressionism and the Blue Rider Group, and reveal how the birth of abstraction in art was fired by Wassily Kandinsky’s experience of the music of Arnold Schoenberg. Central to this moment were theories about synaesthesia — hearing sounds as colours and seeing paintings as visual music — which whipped the arts into a creative frenzy of collaboration and cross-fertilisation.

We find out how the development of these ideas led to the extremes practiced by Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, whose magnum opus was to have been a gigantic son et lumiere show in the Himalayas which would bring the world to an orgasmic conclusion as the physical world dissolved into pure spirit.