One transition that I like on the album is “Garden of Stars” to “Inclusive”, which makes me feel relieved. It reminds me of water lilies that grow after forest fires.
It’s always a dialog, the possibility that something good can emerge from it. In “We Let It In,” the line “all it in a splendid flame” is an attempt to say that destruction is part of the process. Nature is always changing. What we worry about is that we won’t be part of the picture.
Can we combine innovation and conservation?
You want some kind of game between those two. Obviously we can’t fix the world in aspic. My friend who is a farmer said, “There are always new species, some of which will take care of themselves.”
And what could be subject to the “fix it” techno-utopia?
We all think that politics doesn’t matter anymore, that technology will become politics and create the future. It deals with Ayn Rand’s terrible individualism – Nietzsche for teenagers – and the idea that willpower is the most powerful force on the planet. I wanted to tell her that it turned out not to be true.
If community is the alternative, do we need a shared climate culture?
What I see happening now is the largest social movement in human history. There are billions of people involved in taking care of the environment, but the media is not looking. There’s a huge amount of creative intelligence around, that’s what keeps me hopeful. There is a book that I often refer to by Alexei Yurchak called Everything is forever, until it’s no more.
Your album title.
Right. It’s about the end of the Soviet Union, how it just disappeared overnight. One day everyone is a communist, the next day not. I always thought it was an illustration of how quickly things can change. I think the idea comes from this book that revolutions always happen in two phases. The first stage is when people realize something is wrong. So that’s where we were for a while, except for some ostrich institutions. The second stage is when people realize that everyone else realizes it too. That’s the moment I think we’re heading towards. When an object changes from a liquid to a solid. Suddenly it was a phase change. Within three years, a politician will not be able to run for office without the main issue of climate change.
How do you avoid a climate change album becoming a teaching?
Propaganda is nasty and relatively ineffective. What art is doing is mainly testing where we are by how we feel about things. Emotions are the beginning of thoughts. The other thing the artist is saying is that there are other possible realities. It gives you a small world with its own terms and values.
Do you still watch ASMR?
When I mention ASMR, most people don’t know what it means. It was a veritable underground movement, involving millions of people. A pretty good metaphor for the climate change movement. I touch on it a bit in some of these recordings, it’s not declarative: “I’m here, you can listen if you like.” Commercial answers to attention are always bright, loud, quick, shocking. ASMR is saying no, this is quiet, slow, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing much and it lasts a long time. Well, that’s what I’ve been doing for so many bloody years.
To me, that’s one of the things that suggests change in the world. Marie Kondo is a different person. The lesson of minimalism is finally penetrating on a general level. It is a profound message because it is anti-capitalist. The impact of what she said was: What would your life be like if it required all of that? This is how people change how they feel. They may have never heard of minimalism – or capitalism – but they started to live a little differently.
Are these the phase change signals you’re talking about?
That’s right. In Yurchak’s book, when the Soviet Union disappeared overnight, everyone was ready. Anyway, everyone has been working around the system, in its stagnation, doing all the things you need to do to stay alive. When the system goes away, they just carry on. There is very little chaos.
