Metanoia.
The Mountain is the Mountain & the Path Remains the Same. Verily, it is only my Heart that has Changed.
Friends, I wanted to share an excerpt from a recent interview I had with Luminous Dash where I began to speak on the central impulse behind creating “Something is Announced by your Life!’
It’s something I eluded to in last years Afterwards to the LYF Archives, and will no doubt write on again and again until that impulse is satiated, has found its form, or has evolved into something ever more alluringly unreachable.
The past few years have indeed been a transformative moment for both me and Ebony, as I know they have been for many of you out there in this wonderful and strange new world.
We are still in a process of integrating and enacting the subtle and yet profound shifts that have been taking place on our interior landscapes. The beautiful, often chaotic dance of soul making is not something that can be rushed or forced. We each move at our own pace, learning and growing in ways that are unique to us.
Personally, I have spent the past few months attempting to overcome a certain reluctance towards putting my self back “out there” with the release of this new record.
Though we have created a work I am very proud of, I feel in the midst of this richly complex and deeply personal journey, one that occurs within the quiet recesses one heart & mind and by its very nature, remains invisible to the public eye.
It would feel some what cheapened by putting it in a press release, announcing the intimacies of ones experience to strangers.
In the mercurial transmission of soul theres no sales pitch, no campaign content calendar, no marketing plan. So often I see this world and I want no part in it.
Over the past year we have let all the trappings of the “business” fall away in the search for genuine connection with others.
This is what I intend this space here on substack to become, a place where we communicate from the heart away from the objectifying gaze of social media.
Yet despite dreaming myself a storyteller, I have not found the words to speak with a coherence that I am courageous enough to share; Secretly I have tried to tell my own story on several occasions in the past year, spoken direct to the camera in the guise of modern of live streamed confessionals, and perhaps inevitably, I have aborted the videos feeling the cringing weight of the absurd baring down on me.
So for now, whatever that miraculous something I am ever in search for is, I will continue its pursuit with oblique strategy; cryptically, lyrically in the emotion of song, or perhaps in glimpses that emerge during conversations, like the following with our dear friend Jan:
The subtitle for Something is Announced by your Life! is “a soundtrack to metanoia”. You have referred to the previous records as being rather dystopian in contrast to this album being far more optimistic, is there a social message?
This is something I have been trying to write about for the past year or so, but I struggle to find the right words or language. Discovering this word “metanoia” has helped me point towards what is a profoundly wordless knowing born of a series of profound experiences that began in 2019 have fundamentally changed my perspectives on life and the relationship I have with the world around me. In the Christian tradition Metanoia is usually translated as “repentance” but in its original meaning it expressed something closer to “going beyond the mind you have now”.
For me this characterises the movement from the perceiving yourself as an isolated individual in an indifferent cosmos to the viscerally felt aliveness and interconnection with the consciousness that permeates and the generative life force that animates everything in creation… A sense of coming “home” and belonging that I had been estranged from for most of my adult life. These experiences both informed the initial creation of the new record and have continued to unfold… The “message” then is nothing new, and I am cautious to come across as “evangelical” or whatever, for it is for each to find and relate to in their own way. Its a story that I know is no different to the many told since the begging of time, returning from exile in the underworld re-enchanted with the majesty of life. My only message is as ever around letting go of the crutches of dogma and belief systems and surrendering to the mystery of being.
Which takes a lot of courage and resilience… I see we’ve come full circle.
You wrote a beautiful piece in The LYF Archives art book that you put together with your former band mates in WU LYF. While different, is there a line from Go Tell Fire To The Mountain to the blue flame on the cover of Something is Announced by your Life?
Shortly after finishing Something is Announced…, creating The LYF Archives commenced, in the process I came to several numinous insights, which I have been trying to articulate, to communicate ever since. I hadn’t realised at the time of naming, but both Go Tell Fire & Something is Announced… encourage the verbalisation of an ineffable “something”; which indeed I have come to symbolise with the metaphor of the Flame. Suddenly a clear line appeared to me, that golden thread that is woven throughout my art, which in itself is just my personal expression being brought into form. This is something I am looking to write, to speak on in the near future, the annunciation, but for now I’d like to offer my sense of “Soul making” framed with the metaphor of the spark: Each of us is born with a luminous seed of potential, the spark of soul essence, and through our choices or experience it can be cultivated into a powerful flame, whose light in turn may inspire others to catch a fire, this is the light inside of thee, that will set this world on fire that Get Spooky croons to. I realise now this is my life’s work, and these years, the creation of all my records have been a process of coming to understand how to both nurture and utilise this flame in myself and others… When I am brought into this state of clarity, or remembrance, these thoughts bring such a strong sense of purpose and excitement for what the future may bring.
James, I sincerely hope you are able to re-channel the WU magik again.