Forgive me for starting a post with a saying, but here is one: “Render the familiar unfamiliar. Render the unfamiliar familiar.” It’s a sentiment that floats around–phrased in countless ways–across myriad arts and sciences, and it best describes the inspiration for my latest mix for LYL Radio.
Recently, I’ve been on something of a religious kick. No–not in the sense of practicing any particular religion, but in a growing curiosity about what it actually means to be “religious,” and how religions come to be. I would like to think I arrived here through music but there have been other streams.
Lately, one of my main sources of inspiration has been Dr. Andrew M. Henry’s impressive and engaging “educational” YouTube channel, Religion For Breakfast. What it offers is an exploration and study of religion through a nonsectarian lens, using science, sociology, and anthropology to examine how humanity interacts with belief and history. From the rise of New Age movements to seemingly esoteric topics like The Book of Enoch or Understanding Wu Wei, his channel feels like a perfect gateway–an entry point into ideas you may have always had only a germ of a thought about.
My previous mix, “The 49th Day (四十九日),” was, in many ways, inspired by my own deep dive into Zen Buddhism, as filtered through a different kind of divinely-inspired music. For this mix, though, I found myself continually sprouting ideas sparked by Dr. Henry’s short video on so-called “UFO religions.”
In that video, the notion that periods of deep contemporary trouble often coincide with the rise of new religions—ones inspired by science, science fiction, and spirituality—really struck a chord with me. As outlandish as they may sound, movements like The Aetherius Society, Raëlism, and Scientology trade on the power of the great unknown: space, aliens, and technology, all deployed to affect people spiritually in ways existing practices sometimes can’t. And when they find a way to use—or repurpose—divine avatars from other religions, they do so by explaining it away within their own maze-like cosmologies. It was the occult being remixed into something else.
So what does this have to do with what you’ll hear here? It led me to think about cosmic-inspired music—music grounded in very human emotion, yet interspersed with all sorts of futuristic notions, with ideas untethered to ground on this Earth. I kept returning to Paul McCartney’s Wings and their track “Venus and Mars,” a fascinating piece whose entire premise rests on a tossed-off idea uniquely indebted to a strain of English sci-fi millennialism, best exemplified by figures like George King. Others, such as Dr. Timothy Leary and Dr. John C. Lilly turned to contemporary chemistry and biophysics as pathways to the divine. Music and art itself was never that far behind.
In the end I kept thinking: in our uniquely bizarre and trying time, let’s find more of that—and try to share it through what I do. Because, as the long-gone, Madchester-adjacent band Candy Flip once put it, sometimes you “need space, to be free again.” And I thought, here’s something to float on…
Cosmic Moon (宇宙の月)
Tracklist:
Tanny “K” (谷啓) – Gachooooon No. 2 (Ecology Mix)
Takkyu Ishino (石野卓球) – Monkey Dance
Soft Ballet (ソフト バレエ) – Twist Of Love (The Andrew Barker Remix)
John C. Lilly – Cogitate (Ambient Mix) by PBC
Organization (オーガニゼーション) – Hope Giant Club Mix
Taeko Onuki (大貫妙子) – Cosmic Moon
EPO (エポ) – When 2 R In Love (Ambient Love House Mix)
Natural Calamity (ナチュラル・カラミティ) – Dark Water & Stars (Natural Calamity Alternative Mix)
Intastella – Arrival
Soul Family Sensation – Other Stuff
Candy Flip – Space (Jesus Loves You Remix)
Hypnotone – Sub