THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “This album is dedicated to my daughter Delphi and is about both the intimacy and rawness of birthing and mothering her during a global pandemic in 2020 and the cosmic realisations I had as a human being following this experience,” says Natasha Khan, known professionally as Bat For Lashes.
“I saw how Delphi came through me, through a mysterious portal, one more babushka doll in a long line of DNA. I memorised her first giggle, the smell of the spiral in her baby hair, the swirls of the milky way, echoes of our existence calling out through time. I noticed I was suddenly animal. My body morphed and provided, in an act of blind servitude and quiet devotion. I returned momentarily to the cycles and seasons, through naps and breastfeeds, writing this music in any spare moment I could, methodically mapping out the experience of having my mind slowly blown by something so seemingly common.
“I had partaken in bringing in life, yes. But I had seen the portal through which we have all travelled and will all travel back through again one day. I was suddenly re-connected to every living, conscious being, and it hurt with its profundity. I cried and cried because I was alive, I was vulnerable, I was tapped into the potent mother energy and I was outraged. Something big was being realised throughout those sleepless nights and anxious global unrest days. A more potent, heightened archetype of the aspects of myself that are a mother was waking up. An overarching matriarchal force that I wanted to envelop people in. I named her The Motherwitch, because she, unlike I, represents a universal force. One we can all tap in to.
“Since becoming a mother I have noticed how desperately we all need to heal our mother wound, heal our relationship to mother nature — our greatest mother. Our detachment from her and from the cycles, and from her understanding of the seasons of life, and therefore our own need to grow and die and process things and let go of things and work through grief and trauma, and be held emotionally to do that, as a society, as a global society, is sorely lacking.
“I felt a very strong grief around our lack of contact with the natural world, how our ecosystem and biodiversity is dying. I wanted to rematernalise people, because the way we’ve lived, in such a sort of patriarchal individualistic way (I’m not talking necessarily about feminism), it’s about the corporate structure, the cities, the artificial; has divorced us so intensely from nature, that we’re in the hands of something that’s very lifeless. I think that when you’re disconnected from that, it’s really hard to be juicy and creative, to honor your seasons and feel held, nurtured and sustained through life’s ups and downs. And ultimately to understand and empathise with our basic humanness.
“We are all going through so many different things and we don’t have rituals, we don’t have elders, we don’t have intergenerational households. We don’t mimic the rest of nature, in the way that the rest of nature learns from their elders. They feel part of the system, animals and plants and trees, you rely on each other and help each other to feel supported and sustained and nourished. I think a huge part of what came out of Covid for me, I became a mother and I simultaneously realised that we’re all very much lacking this healthy relationship to our mother archetype, and in that our relationship to the feminine itself: The life giving mother, the wise old crone, the sage and witch and mystic and seer, the midwife, the teacher, the truth teller and Lady Death. These beautiful, very important aspects of womanhood and femininity and feminine energy that are missing for everyone, and are flickering in our ancient memory.
“I think the only way to heal our society is to reconnect with our empathy, compassion, power and love, which to me is a very matriarchal energy. I think through firstly connecting with that we can also then heal the wounded masculine — which is damaged by this disconnection too. I think we need to heal our men, the masculine archetype and our masculine energies inside of ourselves as well, as the sacred healthy masculine archetype too plays a vital role in the balance.
“So it’s a big lofty mission in my mind and this is just my tiny way of trying to reconnect people. This album ultimately, is a small slice of music, about a very personal story, and I made it for Delphi so she can hear it when she’s grown and know how much her Mum loved her. But, there is a secret hope that it acts as a matriarchal balm to its listener and reconnects them; like I was re-connected, to the healing power of empathy and reverence for our planet, and for the fellow beings we share it with; all with a life, all with a time to be here, a story and a pass to the portal.”
