Interview:

Music can be a mere imitation of the mundane. Even hit music and advert jingles try to make you comfortable with setting the tempo to the average heart rate. If we disregard mainstream pop and plastic music, I do think most music has a “spiritual” ingredient with varying depth and reach. Music can express something that words can not begin to encompass. Music describes something more ancient and closer to the cosmic truths than man itself. The spiritual significance of music depends upon your view on spirituality. Let us assume there is a spirit, a “higher” being, then music could be the expression of that; a “divine language” like some Greek philosophers theorized. On the other hand, man could be a machine without any ghosts in there at all. Then music could be regarded as the most advanced expression from this machinery. Music could be viewed as the audible version of the subconscious and the conscious, or at least selected aspects of it. These two views could also be combined into a holistic view where the spiritual framework is an abstraction of the “psychological” model. Just like Carl Jung described Northern Mythology and Asatru to be a “spiritualized” version of psychological concepts. This latter synthesis is what lays closest to Enslaved’s angle on spirituality in music.

“Music is everything and nothing, it is flesh and it is spirit.”
– Ivar Bjørnson, guitarist in Enslaved