WHAT IS DÆTHLESS MUSIC?

Xander here. Dæthless Music is a new adventure in which I am inviting singers, musicians and producers at varying stages of their artistic path to be part of a deep, transformative, collective-creative-spiritual process.

What is your “Soul Duty”?

As many of you know, this time last year, I was being treated for – of all things for a singer/beatboxer – TONGUE cancer. The fear of death, or losing my tongue, made something feel more real than ever before. And that was the profound sense that I am alive for such a short, precious time, and that in that time, I have a duty to my soul to follow the deepest, highest, or wisest path I can.

I realised that music was one of my Soul Duties. And it became clear that I needed to carve out a huge amount of space in my life to walk this path fully.

As humans, I believe it’s unbelievably important to understand what our Highest Vision is - and then to walk the path it reveals. This is part of what it means to live, as Rob Burbea called it, a Beautiful Life.

Now that I’m through the more acute phase of recovery, a new fire has ignited within me. I’m deep in the process of writing music that will form my next album. It feels glorious. But what does it mean for you?

The Dæthless Sanghā

As well as working on my own music, I’ve also devoted myself to building a community of people who want to share in this holy fire for music.

This will involve collaborative music-making, songwriting, online jamming, creative accountability, and other socially supportive ways to create.

This feels hugely important to me.

So many of us are out there, working alone, trying to motivate ourselves to prioritise our art.
We have these deeply creative beings inside us, DYING to dive into our artistic works.
But what happens?

Life happens.
Events arise.
Relationships, family commitments, the new season of your show drops.
Addictions. Distractions. A little bit of this, a little bit of that...

Somehow, the flame gets lost.

Devoting ourselves to art has never been easy, but it may actually be impossible to do it alone.
So what can we do?

We’re better together

Music is - and always will be - a social endeavour.

Every art scene, every musical movement has its central figures – its so-called geniuses.
Its Picassos. Its Joni Mitchells. Its Bob Marleys.

It’s so easy to pedestalise these artists, to imagine they were radically ahead of the curve.
But they didn’t emerge from nowhere.

There’s always a vibrant scene of similarly oriented artists around these individuals – a shared aesthetic, approach, style or sound built by untold others, without which their art couldn’t have been made.

Brian Eno once said that we glorify “geniuses” too easily, when in fact, music is more about sceniuses – the collective creative intelligence of a music scene.

The greatest music isn’t made by some lone visionary with god-given talent.
It’s made by artists who are woven into, and deeply shaped by their participation in a vibrant, connected creative community.

Of course, honing our craft requires plenty of alone time too.
But humans are fundamentally social creatures.
We draw inspiration, power, and motivation when we band together.

The Herd become the Heard.

Becoming Dæthless

That’s what Dæthless Music is:
An orientation.
A band of humans united by our commitment to music as a lifelong, ever-deepening path we feel to be our Soul’s Calling.

The word Dæthless is just a word I made up.

Conceptually, “The Deathless” (Amāra in Sanskrit) was a word the Buddha used as a synonym for Nirvana –freedom through realising the transcendent beyond.

Etymologically, it’s a reinterpretation of the old Scots spelling of deathless, combined with the Latin ligature æ to evoke the concept of the Dæmon, which, in ancient Greece (and through thinkers like Milton, Joyce, Crowley, Jung, Hillman, and Burbea), has come to mean an inner, guiding, creative spirit.

To walk the Dæthless path is to be guided by one’s Dæmons—toward a life that extends beyond this person called “me”, beyond our own death. Into something vast.

Actually… into something infinite.

The Dæthless Manifesto

If it’s helpful, I’ve drafted a few basic principles I’d like to explore with you, fingers pointing to these twin moons of musical-spiritual devotion:

To walk the Dæthless Path:

1. I devote myself to discovering, developing, and refining my deepest creative vision. This becomes my Soul Duty.

2. I devote myself to walking the path of this Soul Duty with as much consistency and wholeheartedness as I can muster.

3. I aspire to learn about and cultivate my True Refuges: the practices, relationships, qualities and questions that nourish my steadiness and capacity to walk this path.

4. I aspire to release—or at least minimise—the distractions, detours, and False Refuges that hinder my ability to remain devoted to this calling.

If you’re reading this right now, I believe there’s a reason you were led here.

Know that the seeds of creativity you nurture now may grow into vast forests that nourish untold futures.

May the music of your soul echo long after your precious human life has ended.

May your music be Dæthless.