I Wanna Jump Like Dee Dee | journal

stills taken from Killing Crimson vid

and fucked around with by me

08/24

white hills-

ego sensation

dave w

sonic alchemists sculpting a path of conscience and truth unconstrained by convention, inhaling the energy of their prolific creativity, treasuring a life of freedom, ecstasy, mystery, subversion, struggle and dreams

beyond this fiction

the new album

a document for the precipice of humanity

meditative introspection

juxtaposed with

restless familiarity

juxtaposed with

tempestuous sensuality

a manifesto to challenge

your imagination-

your fears-

your desires-

will you succumb to your own conscience?

will you accede to your own yearning?

will you forge your own path?

giles-

For me, there's an extra dimension to this record. It feels much more expansive, like there was almost a clean slate for experimenting to get the different textures that you created.

It feels more introspective.

dave-

Personally, I think that introspection has always been a constant for me.

ego-

But I could see you could find it more introspective than our other records, because there's more of a focus on the vocals.

There are more lyrics.

With that, I think it adds a more literal sense of that introspection for a listener.

Was focussing on vocals a purposeful decision?

Not really. Outside of one track, all of the vocals on it were arranged by Ego. The exception was Clear As Day which was something where we pressed record and I just literally sang that in one shot. I had the phrase "clear as day". And, you know, "markings in dry clay" were the two things that I had from it and then everything else was riffed.

But everything else, the lyrics were put together with things that I had written, some stuff that Ego had written, and then, you know, I just left it to Ego to sit there and do scratch vocals of how she thought the vocal should go over the songs. And then I just came in and sang and maybe changed a few of the ideas that she had, because my vocal range couldn't hit it, or how I played the guitar part for whatever reason.

But going into the record, there were a couple of main things that we wanted to do. The record before it, Splintered Metal Sky, even though it was something that we played live in a studio, that record had very much a feeling of something more mechanical, and something really kind of constructed and not necessarily something that felt free flowing. But that was the overall style that we were going for on Splintered Metal Sky, and also we did not compose the music together for that record. We composed the music separately - ideas that Ego had recorded on her own and then ideas that I had recorded on my own. And then we just kind of went through it all and figured out like, oh, we like this, we don't like that, we like this.

So with Beyond This Fiction, when we started to write the music for it, I wanted to write things from the ground up, it's the two of us, the two of us playing just like a loose idea, like, let's just hammer it out and kind of figure it out. So, real early on in the process, we were really excited about it. And we were just about to go on a number of tours that would have taken us at least 12 weeks out of not playing any of this new music at all. So right before we went out on these two tours, we went into a studio - and the songs were literally brand new - and I just wanted to catch them at basically their infant stage. And I was like, I don't care if there are mistakes, I don't care. If the song will change as we continue to play it, that's fine, everything felt really good to both of us at that time. And we just wanted to catch that moment.

So, for me, those were the big things about it.

And, you know, you might not hear it, but there are mistakes all over this thing. And I think that is another thing that adds to it being intimate to the listener.

Perfectionism is an interesting thing isn't it? You know, how some people are really focused on making their art perfect or as perfect as they can. And how some people let go of perfectionist tendencies. I guess it's an evolution in their being. But from a listeners point of view, I, agree with what you said about intimacy. To me, imperfections show the fallibility of humans and I like that.

Yeah. And if you take, for example, Killing Crimson. You can really sit down and listen to that song and hear our tempo changes, it's like it speeds up, it slows down, it speeds up again, slows down again, you know, like this constant push and pull that goes on in that song.

And I think this becomes more valuable as there's more music that's AI generated and is tempo perfect, and is note perfect and is perfect for some people's listening habits. And for other people, it's more about the experience of hearing their artists creating something that is human, you know, and has variation and, yeah, those fallibilities.

I mean take Brian Eno's book....A Year With Swollen Appendices.... there's this one part in it, where he's talking about working with David Bowie.

And he was saying, you know how, like, at times, it's difficult to work with David because they're polar opposites. Like where Brian would like to perfect things, David was always like, 'no, first take, that's good, so what if there's a skronk in the sax part, who cares', you know, and if you listen to any number of Bowie records that those two did or any just any Bowie in general, you know, like, The Man Who Sold The World, you can hear Mick Ronson's fingers flub.

Low is a perfect example - there are mess ups all over that album. Then you look at Lodger, you know, and the song Boys Keep Swinging. It's like, you know, that track wasn't working. They didn't have the magic. So what did Bowie do? So, Bowie got the guitarist to switch to drums, the drummer to move to bass guitar and the bassist to move to keyboards. Both of them not proficient on their new instrument. And you listen to Boys and you can hear the new drummer hesitating, because he doesn't play drums. But that's what made the song.

So that whole kind of thing was so important for us to capture on this record, especially with the overall concept of Beyond This Fiction which is looking beyond what your constructs are, or what you're told to do, looking at how you live your life and, you know, the choices you make.

Thinking about the feelings that the songs give me…let’s take a few – Throw It Up In The Air…that song mesmerizes and hypnotizes me. Clear As Day is quite jagged but I think the bass and guitar shards make it feel claustrophobic, yet the brilliant moments of pause give it space – I think that’s really effective. Fiend is beautiful with its octave jumps. The Awakening is like a subversive meditative dreamland.

So I get these competing feelings of claustrophobia, dreamy, subversion, but the sonics feel quite spacious. I’ve no idea if that makes any sense (ha!)…but, I’m quite interested in how you put the running order together?

Actually, this one was really easy, it just kind of unfolded itself into a perfect layout. You know, usually I'll do a bunch of different versions and then I'll pass them over to Ego and then she'll be like, ‘Oh, I like this about this or I like that about that,. maybe move things around a bit.

But here, the music really dictated how it was going to be. So, Throw It Up In The Air for the opener, it’s kind of fumbling over itself in the beginning and it's kind of an odd way to start a record with this like, bubbling, low key synthesizer and then this “Kadoosh”, neanderthal thing comes in, which then just formulates into a powerhouse.

the second half of the song,yeah

Yeah, and then so you have this massive thing and then what are you going to do? You're going to follow it with like Killing Crimson? Another big one?

No, that's not going to work.

So we follow it with this darkness, you know Clear As Day being the starkest focus. It felt obvious that that was going to be the next one.

And then, after Killing Crimson (the single) you've got Fiend, which I really love. It's such a great, kinda surprising, song.

Oh, thanks. That song almost didn't make it. That song was a huge struggle.

how come?

We were trying different things with it, like messing with the bass line a lot.

Yeah, it was one of the last things that we had put together before going into the studio. Going into the studio it was just drums and bass. So we tracked it, with Ego playing the drums and me playing the bass. But it was a completely different bass line. We wrote the song, had a whole different chord structure. What is on the record is nothing of what it was when we recorded it. There was something about it and I couldn’t let it go. And then Ego came up with the bass line that's on it now. After that point, then it was just building it up to how you hear it on the record. But yeah, that song took the longest on the record to do.

Yeah, I almost thought it wasn't gonna make it. At a certain point, I was like, ‘maybe this song isn't for this record. It'll come back another time.’ But Dave held onto it. He was like, ‘no, no, no, it’s there somewhere’ {laughs}

trust me, I'm a politician! Haha!

there was just something about it...

That synth part was there from the very beginning, you know, the ghostly, floating vibe.

The basslines are so cool with all the octave shifting and arpeggios….really love them

Yeah, and both of those songs - Clear As Day and Fiend - are really bass and drum driven tracks. Guitar is totally secondary.

They give the songs their flavour.

photo courtesy of Alex Carter

The other thing, too, was like - I'm glad that you said that you felt the album felt spacious - because that was a huge, huge thing that I wanted to get across while mixing the album.

We wanted to kind of meld everything that we we've been feeling over this time span, but make it in a way that wasn't as dense as the earlier albums were, and didn’t have the harsh and robotic feeling of the later albums.

So can we talk about the themes that we hear on the record? Like what was influencing you?

Yeah, I was gonna say, kind of coming back to the whole idea of introspection, and lyrics, a lot of that was actually driven by the overall concept of the album, because we started off, or I should say, Dave, really thought of this concept of Beyond This Fiction, because at the time, he was really interested in a lot of the ideas from Joseph Campbell.

Yeah, like reinvestigating, this idea of the power of myth. He’s obviously known for the book Power of Myth, but one of the last books that he wrote was all about going into space and how the myth of humanity needs to change. His idea is that we need new myths, and myths of globalism, myths that say it's not this country/that country, that there are no borders and that being able to look at that image of the blue dot from space really proves that we're one whole thing. It’s saying that not only are we humans one thing, but the planet and humans is all one thing - the greater universe, it's all one thing and how moving into this new age of man going into space, how we need to change - going beyond this fiction beyond what we're all told and led to believe. And I'll stop at that and let you finish what you were saying, Ego!

I mean, the ideas are general ideas, right? And Joseph Campbell is just a teacher who teaches in the world, who talks about these ideas a lot.

And so, this was our jumping off point of talking about beyond this fiction, like fiction being society, basically, the constraints that are set forth by society, the rules that that we all follow blindly, even when they're ridiculous. In the service of conformity, society obviously works better for the powerful, you know, the group that's in power. Things are better for those people when everybody else conforms.

But these ideas aren't for everyone. A lot of people are really comfortable with conformity. In fact, probably most people are comfortable with conformity, because it takes a lot energy to think for yourself. People don’t want to stick out, they want to stay with the group. This is the safe place to be.

But there is a large group of us out here that look beyond the fiction.

And we create our own story.

This is this idea that Joseph Campbell talks about, and that we explore in the lyrics on our album. Beyond This Fiction is this idea of riding between opposites. So, Joseph Campbell talks about that in terms of heaven and hell.

Yeah, he explains it through religion. Right? So, he'll talk about right and left, not right and left in regard to political terms, but as far as a path goes, right?

On the right, you have heaven. On the left, you have hell. And if you subscribe to either one, like, you know, you’re going along with a norm, right, like, 'I follow Satan', that’s a norm.

But he talks about the true heretic being the embodiment of a hero who rides between between opposites, creating their own way, and in turn, becoming a fully realized person of what they were supposed to be within their movements along their way of life.

He also says that you can look at someone's life in terms of a circle, right? Now, there are people who will travel the right side of the circle, which is the person who's born and grows up in the same area, you know, goes to school gets married, stays in the same area has a family, and they go through their circle of life within the constraints of what they've always known. And the person who takes the left path is the person who's going out and who is confronted with all kinds of difficulties within their life but, in turn, find out more about themselves, you know. It's the same thing but looking linearly, right? There was a point in time when societies looked at the cycles as circular. But then, around the time of post-Christ, time became linear.

So, the fact is that your movement is never just one line, and every day there is the opportunity to shoot yourself off into a different direction.

And by shooting yourself off into that different direction, you are going to learn something about yourself, something that is going to make you a better person that is going to make you more equipped, moving forward, in whatever your life is and what you want it to be.

It's an interesting one, this.

I'm sure a lot of people that have chosen conformity - however, you want to define conformity - for whatever parts of their life that feel uncomfortable or unsafe to not conform – like clothes, hairstyle, career, bigger house, keeping up with the joneses - but because the world is so much more volatile than it was 30, 20 even 10 years ago, that comfort of choosing that path that used to take you on a straight line isn't going to happen anymore.

The world of perhaps 30 years ago has changed, and so they choose this route for comfort, but that route has now become very, very bumpy and I think that those that have always or already chosen the opposite or have HAD to live with uncertainty for all or large parts of their life, well I think those people are probably more equipped now to deal with the way that the world is, because they have had to live with that volatility, ambiguity, uncertainty as ‘normal’ and now it's part of everyone’s lives to a much larger degree.

Just thinking about conformity and how you dress, for example. Even those groups that espouse non-conformity – like metal, punk, whatever - become conformist and become human in how they identify – like you have to dress a certain way....thank god for those that are crossing those lines!

Yeah, it’s like they want to have groups and they want to identify themselves. So it's like you even see groups on the fringe, that I kind of feel should be embracing the fact that they're different and don't subscribe to certain identifiers, but everybody seems to eventually default to ‘you got to call me this. We're identifying as this.’

I just think it's human nature, but the problem is, once we start identifying ourselves, then there's conflict.

Because once people start identifying, it creates this tribalism.

You're absolutely right. And I understand the desire and need to identify for many reasons. But it can extend into this trait that we have of putting things in boxes which then creates its own problems

Yeah. I think it's just human nature. I think it would be nice if people could just accept that, you know, we're all alive now and we'll all be dead at some point. And that's what we have in common. We all have this in common. We have this in common with the birds, with the Americans, with the British. We all have the same thing in common that we're here for a brief time, so why are we making so much trouble? Like, why do we have to make so much nonsense out of it? Going back to what you said earlier, that was a really great point about the uncertainty of living this life, because part of Beyond This Fiction is an overarching world philosophy, but part of it is personal and I feel like Throw It Up In The Air is a pretty personal song for us about living the life that we live, being artists and committing to it and just saying fuck it. But, and here’s to your point, maybe in some ways, that isn't the risky option that it once was. I mean it's still risky option. But maybe, yeah, when, for example, AI is taking everybody's jobs now, we’ve lived with everybody taking our jobs for forever before AI!

I don’t know whether it’s the people that I’ve chosen to surround myself by physically or virtually, you know, but it feels like the effects of late stage capitalism are being laid very bare now and it feels like there's a kind of growing resistance to accepting that way of doing things and falling into that way of life now. I mean it’s still hugely painful, but I sense shoots of change. Obviously, the vast majority of people choose to go into big business and state jobs and I doubt anything significant is going to change in my lifetime. But it feels like there are some things that are starting to change where the line of nonconformity to that route is growing – but I do acknowledge that resistance to the establishment is not always good with extreme nationalism for example. But I do feel some – for those with good and peaceful intentions – rejection of that extreme capitalism.

Do you feel perhaps a little bit more heartened? Because there are more people that now see what you saw 20 years ago?

I mean, I have to say, I think that that is very positive sentiment {all laugh}. That’s amazing if you're seeing that.

We're not talking to enough people, we need to get out more!

That’s not the kind of person that lives in our neighborhood, you know, when we're out and about, like, walking around and hearing people talking. All the people around us are cogs in the wheel, you know, starting out their careers thinking, they're all hot, that's like, Oh, I got this job, it's so great. And, you know, wheeling and dealing with their earbuds, walking down the street pushing their babies thinking everything's grand and dandy. I can't help but think just give yourself 30 years when you're seen as obsolete or even less than 30 years at this point with how everything is moving along.

Yeah, I mean also I do feel that people need to think long and hard about the fact that, generally, in western nations, people are living longer, they are being expected to work longer before they can “retire”, astronomical long term health care costs ‘cos more people are developing long term health conditions…I mean someone who is perhaps 5 years old today can expect to be working for about 55 years.

Yeah. How depressing. You know, like, to me, statements like that are just depressing. But here’s the difference. We work. We work every day. But we're working for something that is our own.

Absolutely. People need work. I mean, people can’t sit around and do nothing……ok, I mean, some people really like sitting around {laughs}. But humans are kind of like dogs: we need a toy to chew, we got to run and catch a ball. We need that action. It's more about can you find work to do that makes you feel valuable? And so much work that people do is just like, bizarre, nonsensical, like marketing and coding and these things that are just, like, abstract in the most uninteresting way. I can't tell you how many, you know, family members and friends I have that I still can't remember what it is the hell that they do. Obscure and uninteresting, and they haven't sold it to me in a way that I'm able to remember what they do!

One of my podcast episodes last year was with Trevor Dunn. He’d just brought out a record with Sally Gates and Greg Fox called Deliriant Modifier which was a completely experimental and improvised album to explore the effect of controls on creativity. It was based on the work of a neuroscientist called Anil Seth who’s basically says that perception is a controlled hallucination and a hallucination is uncontrolled perception. It’s really fascinating. Took me a while to get my head around the concept…

Yeah, I mean ultimately, reality is your perception.

The other thing about that, too, is how easily manipulated people are now. You know, just by anything. By an algorithm, and things you've clicked on that, you know, the algorithm thinks you like, so it feeds us specific things. So whatever algorithms of whatever social media things you look at is different from what I look at is different from what Ego looks at, and then in turn that shapes your thoughts, ideas, what you think is real, what you think is fake, you know, all of that stuff. I think the people behind these platforms know that. And they use it to their advantage. I think it is all just based upon money. And, you know, us putting these people on a pedestal because they have all this money is completely idiotic.
Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg - name any of them - these people are ill. They are ILL. So, in America, there's this television show called Hoarders, when they go into homes that have just, like, shit just stacked up everywhere. And it's like, ‘look at this person's disease. They saved every newspaper for the last few years. And, you know, blah, blah, blah’. You know what? These billionaires have that same disease. They're just hoarding money. We, as a society, think that these people are geniuses, and somehow we are told that we can be that, which you can't. You can't. I can't, right? We can't. The only reason why Elon Musk has the money that he has is because it was given to him by his family - diamond miners in South Africa, screwing over black people. There’s nothing about that guy that's genius. He hasn't needed anything. He's just taken his money and bought it and used it to pump up his ego. He is a fucking idiot. What is Amazon? Amazon is just the biggest shipping company in the world.

I was listening to a conversation between Yanis Varoufakis and Ash Sarkar recently. And Yanis was talking about tech feudalism…you might have heard about it..he was saying how this tech feudalism has surpassed, even destroyed capitalism. It's feudalism, because basically, we're kind of paying rent to these people who are our feudal overlords. They're the ones that are really running stuff and we’re essentially in a digital prison. Thinking for yourself, doing things yourself, has never been more important

Exactly. Something that you said earlier, just because things are done this way, doesn't mean that they can't be different. That you can’t find another way. There is another way. It just takes people realizing there is another way and taking action in their life.

Which comes to the big question of how can this change start to take place? What’s the catalyst?

Well, I think it's ultimately it's a personal thing. I think people have to make those changes personally, I think that, if you're called to, it's always great to organize people to work on things, especially locally.

I think it’s really important to be involved in your local government, because that's where you can really start to make changes. I do feel the power of just making personal changes is often overlooked, you know, what it means to say ‘I am responsible for the environment. So I'm gonna make less trash. I'm going to think about what crap do I buy in packaging that’s never going to degrade. How can I change what I'm doing? How can I take responsibility for the world? How can I take action when I’m unhappy doing what I'm doing in life? No-one's gonna fix it but me. Society's not gonna fix it for me. Government's not going to fix it for me. I need that change myself.’

When you make that change, someone else sees you made it and goes, ‘Oh, maybe I can do that.’ If you think a small thing doesn't make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito. You’ll wake up with all sorts of bites. It’s very powerful. You know, you have a lot of power on a personal level, making tiny changes within your own life as to things that you're like, well, wouldn't it be nice if we weren't waging war? And if you know, we could have a real president that cared about the world’

We just had city council elections. And we have a really great representative in in our neighborhood and she had an opponent that was really trying to strong arm her out of office.

Like really aggressively and he had quite a lot of money.

It was very, very strange. Anyway, so you know, we vote in the elections and the community gets behind her and it was nice to see that we have a representative in this community. And she's focusing on things like helping tenants that are facing eviction, the very things that you want to see in the world. So instead of looking at the whole world, look closer where you have the power. Everybody has some amount of power, however small.

I don't think people really realize how much power they actually do have. And, you know, I think the system creates an air of powerlessness. And the fact that everything's about the economic base, so it's all about money and it's all about these huge corporations getting everybody to feed their money from the bottom up to them in which they own 90% of it and everybody else has nothing, but you're always in this struggle to try to feel like you have something and then there's all these other things going on: climate change, heat waves, 90 degree weather all the time, fires everywhere, you know, the polar ice caps melting, rising oceans, right? You know, you get these people who are all like, you know, ‘you older generations, you really screwed it up for me, it's all your fault. It's all the guzzling of fossil fuels that you've done’…..yet, that same person has an iCloud account where every single bit of their information is stored on a hard drive that's sitting in the Mojave Desert, in a tin warehouse with massive amounts of AC to cool off the massive number of these hard drives that are storing this equipment in an area where it barely gets below 100 degrees any day of the year. And they don’t see what they're doing to add to this problem of global warming???

Every goddamn day on Amazon, you know. You know, our neighborhood is just full of Amazon boxes on the sidewalk. It's insane.

So, we don't use the cloud, because we understand that the cloud is something that adds to global warming. We don't have AC running all the time in our apartment, because that is sucking up a ton of energy where the majority of that comes from coal or burning some kind of fossil fuel. Okay, so we don't do that. We don't use iCloud accounts. We do have dropbox but we’re just trying to be as pragmatic as possible. But, we go to a farmers market and we buy from a local organic farmer. Seasonal food so we aren't getting blueberries in December, we’re getting blueberries now. And, whatever we can't get from that entity, we go to an independent market that just opened up that calls themselves a Refillery. So there's no plastic packaging.

You come in with your jar, you fill it up, they weigh it and they charge you whatever….

Yeah, they charge you for what you take. And it’s not owned by a massive Corporation. It's a local, independent store supporting someone locally. You know, it's like we do everything that we can to make sure that we aren't giving to the corporations because ultimately your money is the most effective way any of us can protest at this point in time.

Pragmatic, active choices - whatever they look like, however big or small - are something we should all do. But we’re sold convenience through speed aren’t we? And another problem with this protestant work ethic, this meritocracy or having to work 4 jobs to even keep your head above water, is that “work” keeps us so busy, so it becomes really difficult to find the time to make those kinds of choices.

I have a remedy. Okay. Meditate. Everybody needs to meditate. And it's because - and I say this specifically in regard to time - one of the biggest things that I've gotten out of meditation is a completely different concept of what time is. And in just being able to slow yourself down for 20 minutes a day. That 20 minutes, is an unbelievably fast – or slow - period of time. But I think when you're slowing yourself down, you open yourself up to a concept of time that is different from what your manic state is. At all times. And when I come out of the 20 minutes, it's like I can feel the vastness of time. And I feel how our construct of time is based upon our metabolism, how fast it moves. A fly lives for three months, it never sleeps, its metabolism is one of the fastest on the planet. So, its sense of time is massive for what is a short amount of time for us. By being able to slow myself down. I feel like I tap into a greater, universal sense of time, that is unbelievably massive. And, one of the things that it has done for me is that there's time for everything, you do everything and anything you want to. There is the time. Our time on this planet is based upon our biology, but whatever your lifespan is, you have the time. I don't think that there's an excuse to say that you don't have the time. So, if you're somebody that's working all the time, and you don't want to have to buy everything online, you don't have to, you have the time to do that.

g-
I think time is one of the things that stresses people out – like, transactions are made really easy and quick but are a pain in the arse to sort out if they go wrong, because everything is automated and everything is so fucking complex that a chatbot can’t possibly sort. And then that feeling that time is running out because we fill our lives with so much stuff, so many things to do blah, blah, blah.

d-
It's got to slow down, you know? And it's like within the slowing down, you get the vastness of it all.

So I went to a talk by John Robb in London in May. And he had a caption on the projector, which read “Do you believe in the power of rock and roll?” So, over to you! What do you feel music's role is in, some of the issues that we talked about, about society, the way that we live and what is its power?

I think that music is extremely powerful. It has the ability to affect people regardless of language. And I think that the greatest power of music is just to help people feel alive and feel in touch with the essence of what it means to be alive, connected to an energy, a lifeforce.

It can be energetic, or, you know, like when you listen to a really cool rock song, and it makes you feel as cool as the song is. It's like you are connecting with it.

I walk around New York all the time, take the subway, I see people with their earbuds in and I see it happening on people's faces. You see them listening, you don't know what they're listening to.

But you can see that they are like “I have transcended, I have transcended the six train uptown. I am in another world, transported somewhere. And I am divine for this moment where I am listening to this music". And even when it's maybe not that exact feeling, it might be like a really sad song. And you're feeling that sad song, but it's helping you connect in a really transcendent way to these common, universal feelings that we all have.

You don't have to use words to describe it. You can just hear the music and sometimes like the chord change or the little part in the solo or even a drum fill or a weird vocal inflection that expresses something that you couldn't put into words.

It's like we went to see Parliament Funkadelic like three weeks ago at Lincoln Center. It was amazing. George Clinton was awesome. He had to sit down, but that was okay, and the group he had like backing them up were awesome. It was great. But they played Maggot Brain and I mean all the universe is in that guitar solo.

Epic.

Dedicating a life to art is the closest you can come to reaching the divine while living and I don't necessarily say divine in the sense of a god. If you want to think of it as a god, that's fine, but just like as a connectedness to the fact that you're stardust.

Anybody that paints is ultimately creating a continuation of that first painting. A person who sculpts is continuing that tradition of that first sculpture, people who write music are ultimately in a long line of a continuation of what is that first song.

And I think that that song is a song of the universe.

Because it's innately in us, we are literally made of stardust.

And I think that people forget to realize that we are floating in space, to quote Spiritualized. Space is still an ever expanding explosion of the Big Bang. So it's like, we might not feel like we hear the universe. But we hear it. It's like we are in it.

A life of the arts is the closest thing that you can do to living a life that is divine.

I do think that the arts has the power to change people. Like what Ego says -it's like, whatever…you find a transcendent moment in looking at a painting. For me, I've dedicated my life to music, because of what music was for me as a child, hearing it and how it touched me and how I was transfixed by this unknowing at the time, but it was just like, innate. That feeling of when you're listening to a song right, and it gives you shivers. It’s like you tapped into this innate energy that is within that, that affects you, affects you deep down in your core. Now, this record is the first time that any music I've ever been involved in creating gave me the shivers. It brought tears. The title track, Beyond This Fiction, I just had random scribbled phrases and I said to Ego ‘Here you go, take it.’ Then I went out for a day, came back to the studio, and Ego goes like, ‘Okay, I got something together, you know, listen to it.’ And then she left - she didn't want to be around me when I was listening to what she’d done, but it literally brought tears to my eyes, and I couldn't stop shivering. Everything about it, how she took these words and gave them a really powerful meaning. And how those words then in turn, reflected the music.

When we were practicing that song, we always loved playing it because it made us happy.

It made us smile and want to dance around in our studio, you know?

.....Those moments are when you’re the most alive.

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