Technology, Parenthood and the Search for Empathy: An Interview with Liela Moss

From her cottage and home studio in the English wilds of Somerset, Liela Moss is doing her best to stay on top of all the latest technology. But today, her bluetooth-powered headset appears to be winning the battle. After jockeying with it for a few introductory minutes of a recent trans-Atlantic discussion about Internal Working Model—her stark, electronics-wired solo set, her third—the usually unflappable Duke Spirit diva finally gives up and resorts to old-school analog, a speakerphone that works just as well. Which might double as a metaphor for the album’s basic theme, as well—In our fight against the hyper-speed algorithms that predict, program, and patrol our daily lives, set against the backdrop of our increasing reliance on artificial intelligence, does humanity even stand a ghost of a Skynet chance of survival? Over a blipping, bleeping, sometimes David-Lynch-thumping backdrop, the singer sketches foreboding, sinister scenarios, in “Empathy Files,” “New Day,” “Vanishing Shadows” (with Gary Numan), “Ache in the Middle” (featuring Savages anchor Jehnny Beth), and a conversely twinkling “Love as Hard as You Can,” with a cameo from Dhani Harrison. It might not spell out the end of the world. But it wouldn’t make a bad soundtrack.

Naturally, pandemic solitude helped spur these compositions. Left alone to her own sonic devices, Moss—with her musical and romantic partner, Duke Spirit bassist Toby Butler (in a house kept lively by their young scion Sonny and a frisky pet white German shepherd, a frequent video-clip guest), artistic influences regularly tumble haphazardly into each other. So yes, says Moss, 39, her Model cover design was heavily influenced by the classic Trojan Records logo. “We had a bunch of Trojan compilations out last year, some records just on the side for several weeks,” she says. “And we were sort of loving that slightly collage-y, but block-color artwork, and it was definitely on our minds when we were putting the cover together—something very simple, and I’ll tell you why all the reggae records were out—Small Axe, a trilogy directed by British filmmaker Steve McQueen, that was a thing that a lot of us were watching over here during lockdown. It was very much inspired by the integration of black Caribbean culture into London in the ’60s and ’70s, and the Windrush Generation. So it was about racism in Britain, really, and how that was navigated, and the abuses of power, but it was very beautifully done and it had an absolutely exquisite soundtrack.”

And once you understand that synapse, it’s easy to get how Moss made the stylistic jump from 2020’s Who the Power—which focused on easy human targets like Trump in ominous rockers like“Watching the Wolf” to the bleak minimalist soundscapes of Internal Working Model, a world away from the anthemic guitar-chorded racket of the Duke Spirit. Once she settles into non-bluetooth position, she explains herself.

Paste: You visited a monastic retreat, Vipassana, for the last album. But for this one, you seem to have transformed, evolved beyond that.

Liela Moss: Well, maybe I just feel more indignant than ever, just through life experience. You know, just finding so many people unnecessarily full of shit—and I’m sure I’d gone about this last time—but there’s that end-of-tether thing. I mean, we’ve been watching Trump, and as Trump’s demise came to our TVs, we’ve a ludicrous kind of cartoon prime minister, Boris, followed by a whole joke setup, and the hypocrisy has never been so throbbing, and it’s almost like after this last couple of years, I’ve got to rid it. Rid it out of my psyche and reset. But these two pieces of work are almost joined a little, so maybe it’s part of the Big Reset, where we’re starting to get ready to ignore these absolute children that run around trying to be these all-authority figures.

Paste: And you have a real child at home, who’s four now?

Moss: Yeah, yeah. And the real children are much funnier and more honest, so perhaps that’s part of it, too. Perhaps that feeds into the work—having an honest kid around to remind you of what’s real. And questions of how I would raise my child in this age? They run through my mind daily, and I end up thinking about how I’m forced to use my phone, now that I’ve been tricked into compiling this whole index of information and instructions and everything in this one place. So of course, I’m dragged back to this one place all the time, even if I’m just trying to turn my heating on, and it bothers me that I’ve been lured into this Techno Life, this ultra-technological portal that we go to is now sort of wedged in my psyche, and I guess I’m….I’m annoyed at that, and wanting to re-evaluate.

Paste: With the advent of A.I. and Kurzweil’s Singularity, pretty soon we’ll all be working for Hal, that soft-voiced computer from 2001. As in, “I’m sorry, Liela, you can’t play that chord.”

Moss: Yeah. Exactly. I’m hearing Hal encroach, and I’m writing work to figure out how to tell Hal to get the fuck out of my space!

Paste: What was the turning point, where you decided you really had to address this ominous new zeitgeist?

Moss: Was there a turning point? Hmm. I guess it was just noticing how my attention was distracted away from more organic parts of daily life, and having a kid helps with that—seeing that I’m looking at him, but I’m not looking at him. I’m turning away because I’ve got something going on, or the phone’s just telling me it’s time to put hot water on. I think that distracting element has now finessed itself so hugely that when you’re trying to raise a kid it just becomes really obvious, because it’s creeping into every corner of every routine of domesticity—it’s just kind of there, everywhere. I mean, part of my brain has been institutionalized now to look at my phone, check things on my phone, do stuff, check my computer, and I’m really angry at myself for having my attention mined so much. So I’m trying to train it back to perhaps how it was, because everything that we have can be useful, but it’s also using us, and I think it’s at that point — where you feel like you’re being used and you recognize that—that’s what’s happened in my work. I recognized that I’m being used, and I don’t want it anymore.

Paste: Which is interesting, because you’re using technology more than ever to make music on this album. You’re using technology to fight against itself.

Moss: Yeah, and I realize that’s a contradiction. But then also, the synthetic element of the sound is not something that’s connected to the world wide web, so that’s different. And the synthesis of putting something together that has a kind of plasticity to it, but it’s not actually being monitored or tracked.

Paste: “Come and Find Me” sounds like the linchpin, with the line “I’m empathy—I’m not on your phone.”

Moss: Yeah. That was probably the first song of this group of songs, and that kind of set the mood, set the tone. I mean, not for everything entirely. I think that people do love to find a theme, don’t they? But there’s never a theme that covers every single track—things go off on their own tangents. But if there was a starting point, that was it—that was the moment where I kind of set the intention for myself to define what aspect of humanity was more important on this record, and so I was like, “Okay—it’s about empathy on this one.”

Paste: Can humanity actually muster up any last-minute empathy? I think we’ve doomed ourselves to extinction.

Moss: No, no, I’m with you on that. And I’ve gone through points where I’ve just been in abject depression about all of that. And yet, part of me feels that we are more than our forms, more than this material that I’ve mentioned, and maybe we’ll wake up to some sort of higher consciousness at some point and be greatly relieved, you know? And that’s the only hope we have left, to be honest.

Paste: But what boomeranged you back to your own childhood on “Ache in the Middle,” your duet with Jehnny Beth? And confessions like being “conditioned to fight to win” back then?

Moss: Well, in terms of a personal epiphany, my partner and I have been on a really interesting journey, where we have now gone through many, many meetings and lots of assessments. And we haven’t done it yet, but we are now approved for foster care. I don’t know if you use the same term in America, but there are children that need looking after, and it might be for a few months, it might be for a year or whatever. But it’s foster care, not adoption, which is where you completely commit to the whole term. But through that, I’ve read quite a lot about attachments, childhood attachments, and I had to go through lots of talks about those traumas that are in every baby and child experience, that are huge at the time. And we all get over them, but we never completely get over a certain set of experiences that have carved out the synapses in the brain, you know? We cope really well to try and regulate our feelings, but along the way we’ve kind of changed the shape of our brains, and we take those coping mechanisms into our adult life. And then you see them expressed in your friends and your family and yourself, and you see how you have traits, you know? And I suppose in going through those assessments and studying some of the stuff that I did over lockdown, I was like, “Wow! I’ve sort of carved out a certain way of thinking, and it’s because of how things were when I grew up.” I had to travel between my mum and my dad at times, and it causes anxiety, and it changes the way that your brain develops. And that’s just a small thing, compared to much of the population that goes through so much else, so that was a reflective moment on those traits, those shapes in the brain that we have set up so early in our development. You can’t shake them off.

Paste: So you’ve been authorized to take in a child or two. But given what you just said, will you worry what will happen to them after they’ll have to leave you?

Moss: Yeah. Quite. And at that point, in examining your lifestyle, you decide whether you could manage to take that on full time or not. But you do what you can for the time that they’re in the greatest need, and that’s where we’re at right now, and it’s pretty imminent, to be honest — we should have a phone call any time soon, although there’s a little bit of paperwork left to fill out. But it’s been approved, so it’s just a rubber stamp thing now. And it hasn’t been hard, actually, and I was so affected by so much that I read of the life of a poet we have here in Britain, called Lemn Sissay, an Ethiopian name, who’s now a guy in his fifties who grew up in Manchester. So he was this Manchester literary head and this really cool dude, and he endured one of the most outrageous injustices of being thrust as a child into a white Christian family who then gave him up, which was absolutely, startlingly awful. And I knew of his work and some of his poems and his spoken word work, but I didn’t really realize who he was. But I joined up the dots a couple of years ago, and I’ve read and re-read so much of his life, and it sealed the deal for us, really. We were already quite interested in this option, and I guess his life and his work just stacked up to push us over the line and do it, you know?

Paste: Is there a specific country you wanted to help out? Or one you thought needed your help the most right now?

Moss: No, it’d be here in the UK, and different parts of the UK have their own councils. Like in the States you have different counties? So do we, and the county would take on children who are either British born and bred and having serious problems, or it might be that they’re children who are on their own and need help, too. So it could be anyone. But the whole thing is yet to come, and the next time I speak to you, I could tell you more about it. So it will be just one for now, and then we navigate how we carry on. But I can work from home, as I have done for so many years now, and produce this work, with a kind of domestic life wrapped around it. So we’re just gonna power on, man, and just continue to be as productive as possible, but also take someone under our wing, because it doesn’t feel right not to. We’ve reached that point in life where perhaps—even if I were to be a full time activist, pounding the streets—I’m not sure that I could make enough of a difference to feel satisfied. And you know that the voices that I’m deriding really antagonize me, and going back to what I said in the beginning about this Big Reset, I can’t take on these voices that are carved deep into a corporation. I thought, “I can’t do this, but maybe I can help in other ways, so maybe what I should do is make a change immediately, and take someone out of abject trauma or poverty and abuse, and just offer them what you can. Because it’s real, and you can see the change immediately. Trying to talk within the parameters of political power, it just goes around in circles. So let’s destabilize them. There’s another generation coming up under all of us, so let’s make sure that they’re well, and educated and safe, right? Let’s start from there.

Paste: Ironically, one of the people warning us about the advent of A.I and technology 40-plus years ago was Gary Numan, who’s thinking in even more Dystopian songwriting terms these days. How did you wrangle him into appearing on “Vanishing Shadows”?

Moss: He’s such a good guy. He’s great at conversation, you know, about music and experiences, he’s a very honest, open person, so you can have a very easy, interesting, stimulating conversation with him, because he’s just done so much. But actually, I toured with him! I did this one-off album with my friend and my partner, and we called the project Roman Remains. And my friend in L.A. really liked it, and they put it out, and they said, “Well, we need to promote it, and we work with Gary Numan at the moment, and he’s about to go out on tour, so why don’t you do that, too?” And so we were like, “Yeah, man! Let’s do that!” So we toured America with him for weeks, we had a little break, and then we did 10 days in the UK, so after that amount of touring, we kind of knew each other fairly well. And that was a long time ago now, back in 2014, and as much as I felt really close and it was such a cool family vibe for many weeks, we obviously weren’t in constant communication. But I know him well enough to drop an email and politely ask “What do you think of this track?” And I told him I really wanted a male voice on here, and I was just thinking about voices that I love, and there’s only a couple of people that I know that I could email, you know? I wouldn’t just cold call ridiculous famous people—I like the idea of being able to stay loosely in touch with people you greatly admire. So that’s all that happened—I just emailed him, and he was so nice. He said, “I love this track! Yeah!” So I was massively pleased, because of course, you always expect something like, “Oh, sorry—I’m really busy at the moment so I haven’t got time to listen” or a polite refusal. So I was just lucky. He was around, he liked the track, and he duetted along with the same lyrics I’d already put down, and he sent it back. And that was that—it was one of those moments where you get to remember the fact that actually, “Hey—we’ve been friends and we’re still in touch!”

Paste: And you were familiar with the great Jehnny Beth and her significant other Johnny Hostile, too?

Moss: They are both so talented, and so smart, and I’ve been really amazed that I’ve been able to have a collaboration with both of them, as well. And honestly, it’s kind of startling, so I’ve been very lucky. What happened was, Johnny had done a remix for us some six months before—my partner and he had conversed about it, and the remix was very stripped back, very menacing sounding, and I loved what he’d done, so I called him up, and he said, “Well, I really enjoyed working on this, so stay in touch! We could sort of play on each other’s stuff a bit.” So six months go by, and I remembered that comment, so I sent him some music, saying, “We’ve nearly finished this track, and there’s something really precious about it, but there’s just a bit that’s missing.” So we sent it to him hoping that he would put some pretty sounds and maybe some piano on it. And he sent it back and said, “Oh, by the way, Jehnny’s put this on it—she hopes you don’t mind.” And I was like, “Do I mind? No! This is so cool!”

Paste: Going back to the album’s theme, in a way, I bought a box of Frosted Flakes recently, and it had a promotional tie-in to the new Avatar movie, which I don’t recall asking for. And the only thing they had in common was the color blue, it seemed to me. So why did we need this promotional tie-in?

Moss: Oh yeah—that’s it, making the banal necessary has now become utterly disgusting to me. And I think that’s what you can hear in this record. So I just worry that younger people will think that so many things are important, but they’re not important—they’re only important to people that are trying to sell them to you, and I keep recirculating the same message to myself to learn how to express it more succinctly each time, so I definitely revive the same theme in some sort of wish fulfillment that we can get rid of it from our culture. But we can’t.

Paste: Tony the Tiger told me— I must see thew Avatar this week!

Moss: So you have booked your cinema tickets the, right? But I have tons of hope. Think of all the energy and the imagination and the creative power and the health that we do have when we turn everything off. And that said, there’s so much innovation awaiting us that can make things sustainable for us, so there’s potential in everything. And that’s what makes things bright and hopeful, right? And if we can be independently secure in our energy, everything changes, doesn’t it? There’s so much potential for good. It;’s whether people will have the attention span to study these important things. That’s the thing. That’s what we have to make sure of for ourselves and for three generations underneath us—that they are able to maintain their attention.