You sense that religion might be more of an obstacle for others than Ariadne themselves. They come from a classical musical background in which it is commonplace for religion to interweave around music - for non-religious composers to make religious music and vice-versa. “Right, because the whole history of Western art is so heavily religious that it's the large majority of Western art is Christian art”, says Ben.
In our early conversations building up to the interview, one email mentioned not wanting to be too specific about particular religions, reasonably concerned that aligning the music too specifically can perhaps restrict and really obstruct the purpose of what they are trying to do.
“Religion is sort of tough”, says Ben, “because it can put you in a camp. But you know, just like music, you need definitions for things. And I feel like it doesn't feel separate to me, like the spiritual aspect of what we do, it kind of goes hand in hand with the process of making it.”
Christine sees their music as accessible to everyone: “The lyrics can definitely be interpreted as religious, or they can be kind of interpreted as secular. I mean I think there are so many interesting things like for instance in Christianity and the Bible and these stories of like...Even if you were to just look at it from a secular point of view, like human suffering and expression and experience and emotion, there's a lot of like really poetic things that I’m attracted to.”
Ben cites the theories of psychologist Carl Jung to explain the role of spirituality in the human experience: “It seems to me from my very limited knowledge, there's a lot of similarities in the stories of a lot of the world's religions - there's these things that keep on happening. And Jung’s theory is that these things are part of how our brain works. You know, we either evolve to have these things or you know our predecessors evolved to have these sorts of ideas in our unconscious minds.
“I feel the modern world, at least in the West, is getting more and more secular. And I feel like there's this sort of void, that there’s a spiritual need these types of stories and if even if you’re the kind of person who can rationalize it away, there's still a primal need for the sort of recognition or even just the sense of the divine in your life and my point is that, as things are getting more and more secular, there's this sort of void that people need to, need to fill.”
They would, they say, happily play in churches and cathedrals if they were ever asked, although they would not want to be aligned only with one religion. They would even play Christian music festivals though, purely from a musical point of view, they don’t believe they would really fit in with the rock and country vibe.
So, what can we learn from the emergence of Ariadne? Are we seeing experimental electronic music entering a new phase in its cultural development or is this band simply a one-off, an irregularity in the data, born of a meeting in music college between Ben and Christine? Or is it no more complicated than two musicians seeking to express their faith through music, just as people have done for centuries?
As we saw in our feature ‘Synapse’, technology and neuroscience is steadily mapping out and demystifying even artistic elements of the human condition - thus challenging the previously accepted opinion that humans are somehow elevated from the rest of life. As millions of us every day take solace in food, alcohol, drugs, or Netflix, it’s clear that many are dissatisfied and need, perhaps just as we always have, to believe there is more to life. So maybe artists like Ariadne perform an essential function, just as Jung asserts, to reassure us that humans are indeed special and that there is something more to our often mundane existence lived out on the supermarket aisle.
Ariadne's latest album Stabat Mater is out now. Also check out their Vimeo page.