Brian Eno on why he wrote a climactic album with Deepfake Birds Songs

One of the transitions on the album that I enjoyed was “Garden of Stars” to “Inclusion”, which comes as a relief. It made me think of the fire lily that grows after forest fires.

It’s always a dialogue, a possibility that something good can come out of it. In “We Let It In”, the line “it’s all in a wonderful flame” is an attempt to say that destruction is part of the process. Nature is always changing. What worries us is that we won’t be part of the picture.

Can we combine innovation and conservation?

You want some kind of game between these two. Obviously, we can’t fix the world. A friend of mine who is a farmer says, “There are new species emerging all the time, some of them will take care of themselves.”

And what can follow the techno-utopian “fix”?

We all thought that politics was no longer important, that technology would become politics and create the future itself. It has to do with the monstrous individualism of Ayn Rand—Nietzsche for teenagers—and the idea that willpower is the most powerful force on the planet. I would like to tell her that it turns out not to be true.

If community is the alternative, do we need a shared climate culture?

What I see now is the largest social movement in human history. Billions of people care about the environment to some degree, but the media isn’t looking. There is a tremendous amount of creative intelligence around, and that gives me hope. There is a book by Aleksey Yurchak that I often mention called Everything was forever until it happened.

The name of your album.

yes. It’s about the end of the Soviet Union, how it just disappeared overnight. One day they were all communists, and the next they were not. I always think of it as an illustration of how quickly things can change. I think that this book gave rise to the idea that revolutions always happen in two stages. The first stage is when everyone realizes that something is wrong. So this is where we are for a while, except for a few ostriches that are kept. The second stage is when everyone understands that everyone else understands it. I think that’s the point we’re moving towards. When a thing changes from a liquid to a solid. Suddenly it’s a phase change. Within three years, it will be impossible for a politician to run for office without addressing climate change first.

How do you avoid a climate change album becoming didactic?

Propaganda is unpleasant and relatively ineffective. More often than not, art tests where we are by our attitude towards things. Feelings are the beginning of thinking. Another thing the artist is talking about is that other realities are possible. It offers you a small world with its own conditions and values.