Musician Alysha Brilla on surrender as the first step

You’d previously mentioned that music was your first access point for alkalizing the density that you had been carrying as a child. Where does that inner child live within your current arts practice?

My inner child, she is always with me. I may have this experience now, and all these years behind me, but ultimately I’m the same vulnerable, sensitive, curious, wondrous, exalted little being that first wandered this earth 36 years ago. And every time I am moved by music or by what someone says—like what you just said about alkalizing density—I’m the same child who’s feeling just as grateful and excited for the sensory experience of that revelation.

When it comes to music, every time I play my guitar or piano or sing with someone else, it feels as magical as the first time that I knew music existed. And it offers the same access point as it did when I was a child… Music really does connect all those dots for me.

In my experience of listening to your music, you invite in this medicinal, raw catharsis. Instrumentally, you bring in beautiful percussions from a very particular part of the world, then I’m taken to a whole other part of the world through strings. There are melodies that feel very nostalgic, and lyrics that reorient me towards the future. How do you channel this vastness in your music and how do you approach creating a multi-layered landscape?

Thank you so much for those beautiful affirmations and reflections. I’m struck by this whole conversation so far. I’ve been tearing up because I feel very seen by you, so I really appreciate it.

I think being a dynamic being is something we can all relate to. We all have so many layers, and a spectrum of emotions and aspects of ourselves that are brought out by different people, different environments. In terms of my music, the rhythms, tones, frequencies, and even the underlying lyrics and textures are portraits of different times in my life as well as different emotional containers. Some songs are meant to help you access and be with joy, and some are meant to help you cry and help you release those tears. I love creating across that spectrum because, thankfully, my life has given me those multitudes and those many different emotions to channel… Being a conduit in the sense of being open to being a channel for art, or whatever else might come through. We must be deep listeners. We must listen deeply to the earth. We must listen deeply to the people around us. We must also listen to our own thoughts and idiosyncrasies. When I’m receiving melodies and then crafting songs, it’s often like I’m seeing this higher perspective. It’s from having listened deeply to something, and then distilling it into a shareable medicine of sorts.

I always give credit and thanks to Spirit no matter what I’m doing. If it’s waking up and having air in my lungs, thank you for that. Especially for something as magical as writing a song or creating something from this physical realm—how could I not be so grateful for that and not give reverence to something bigger than myself for being able to do that? Even if it’s just to soothe myself; even if I’m not necessarily sharing it. The fact that I’m able to do that, I feel that is certainly a gift. Also, so much of my music feels like it comes through me when I’m around water. Water is a big one, actually.

I was just thinking about water at this very moment.

Really? Being near the ocean, it feels like songs flow right into me. Similarly, if I’m near the river, songs are flowing in. Even with a human-made shower or a bathtub—because the water is there, songs will so often come to me that way.

Water came up for me when you described this process of essentially surrendering to what wants to be channeled through you. Being in bodies of water requires so much surrender and trust, as does the process of being an artist. Within my own practice, surrender and trust are cultivated practices, which I am always ebbing and flowing between. There are times where I’m utterly depleted and then there are times where I’m oozing with openness and connection. What tools do you use in order to hold both ends?

That’s such a beautiful thing to think about. I do believe surrender is one of the first connection points of creating. When you think back to being a child, children are so good at that. They’re so good at coloring what they want, saying what they want, singing when they want, moving like [how we moved] before we learned how to walk a certain way down the sidewalk. Children are skipping and they’re doing twirls and they’re dancing.

I think that trust and surrender are natural modes of curiosity and faith that we’re born into this world with. Some of our systems strip them from us, whether it’s our education systems or in many of our familial lines, with this intergenerational passing down of certain colonial values or social customs. As artists, trust and surrender are the first step. It’s the first step to believing that something you have to sing or say or paint is worth materializing, even for oneself. Having an idea and then saying, “I want that to be not just in here, but out there,” takes trust and surrender to be able to do.

I’m thinking about those artists who are on the precipice of wanting to share their art with the world but are moving through that thick blockage of fear over how their art will be received, or are moving past any of the limitations that capitalism confines us to. Capitalism tries to tell us that artistry is only valid when consumed, whereas so many of the creative prophets of our time and beyond show us that we’re not meant to be palatable. And if we try to be, we’ll lose the plot. The plot being the core essence of who we are, our authentic coding. So how do you keep to the plot? How do you stay in your integrity as an artist, even when you feel blocked and even when it feels unsafe to share with the world?

I do believe that some of the funniest people you’ve ever met might not ever be on a stage. Similarly, some of the most talented musicians you will ever hear are playing in a little house somewhere across the world. Some of the most profound exchanges of words happen between two people who are channeling an intimacy and depth of humanity which not all of us will hear.

When it comes to sharing, especially in this world that is so capitalistic, it’s important for artists who feel like their art is part of a deeper mission to remember that what you’re creating and putting out there will impact the collective in any small or big way. I think we know when we’ve created something that we want to share—when we believe that it’s for the collective, when it’s messaging that we genuinely feel strongly about.

In terms of moving past that initial blockage, we have to remember that we’re not alone. There are artists all over the world who want to share what they’re creating because they feel that it can have some kind of a ripple effect… I think as artists, we’re just wearing a giant sign that says, “I’m a sensitive human being.” To be a bleeding heart artist who says, “I feel a lot and I want to share”—I just think it’s cool.

I studied herbalism for a while and some plants act as sort of a panacea. They help with a lot of things, but so many of them actually are for certain things and for certain people. And I think that of art, too. I think your art is going to reach the people it needs to because that’s how wise and intelligent that greater energy is that makes us want to create in the first place. It might not be that all 8 billion humans on this earth will necessarily resonate with what you’re creating. But it will be that there are people out there for whom what you’re creating is going to help them on their path as a human being.

This connection between plants and artists reminds me of something Alok Vaid-Menon poignantly said in an interview: the natural world templates change, yet humans are uniquely resistant to change and to our growing edges. This brings me to queerness, because queerness offers nonlinear, wayward, fractal ways of existing. I know queerness to be an integral part of both our artistries, and so I’m curious as to how queerness, fluidity and nonlinearity has shown up in your creative process as well as in how you live your life as a creative act?

Yes, yes, exactly. I think that for me, queerness and being able to see life through this dialectical perspective has been the biggest gift I could have had, because it keeps my mind and my spirit fertile. It keeps the soil of all those spaces ready for what may come, because there are generally less preconceived notions or containers or fixed ways that things ought to be.

And so in everything—be it pre-scripted genres in music, how one might dress, the way a person might dance—queerness allows you to step outside of those prescriptions. I think it’s really important—especially now, when we live in this uniquely globalized era of human civilization where many of us are connected to people who are in many different places in the world—we have a diversity of relationships we can co-create with. The idea that we would have these fixed ways of being and relating to one another is antiquated. We are of each other. That’s how we must move. Queerness feels ancient and inevitable as a future template for our beings.

That wording felt like poetry moving through my blood. Thank you… How do you, in your creative process, give roots to all of the messaging that is moving through you?

I would say bringing it back to nature, because nature always harmonizes. If I’m kind of floating away, nature makes me feel so held… Also my conversations with artist friends. It’s the same feeling. I think knowing what elements or people or foods or things help you ground is important, especially if you are a person who’s getting those otherworldly signals often.

What about when you have to convene with technology to transfer that messaging? If I’m in front of my laptop for too long, it feels so invasive to my creative spirit. Yet it’s also the easiest way to transfer my ideas at times, and to organize myself and so on. We’re all constantly contending with the invasiveness of technology while trying to stay rooted in our bodies.

We live in this technological world and it’s ubiquitous. It’s just everywhere all the time. But I will say, I’ve also been thinking about the word itself: technology. It’s a Greek word from the 17th century, and it can be broken into two words: techno and ology. Techno just means an art or a craft. And then ology is the study of something. So technology was here before we started using computers and phones.

I’ve been thinking lately about how certain technologies are given so much credence and so much respect and admiration because they are fields that are dominated by mostly men and white people. But there are all these other technologies that exist and have been developed by so many women, trans people, non-binary people, queer people, Black and Indigenous people. And they are technologies that we can use to help us in our artistic practice as well. For example, I think cooking is a technology. Any time I need to detox myself—let’s say from what a computer or a phone will do to the body and to the brain—cooking will always move me back to all my senses. Anything can be a technology when you break that word down—from the way that you dance, the way that you put furniture together.

What you’re speaking about, it sounds like the Indigenous worldview of animism. If we are to believe that everything carries information, and that technology is, in essence, the way in which information is transmuted, then everything can be technology. Our bodies are our foremost technology, and within that, our breath is also technology.

100%.

I’ll ask one more question to close us out. When I’m listening to you speak, and when I watched your profile on CBC Arts, there is such a strong sense of liberation coming through. Not just in your own practice, but in what you hope for this world. How do you maintain being a liberated artist and human being, while also living within the confines of these colonial, narrow, violent systems? The dissonance is so often jarring.

I’ve been an artist my whole life. I’ve been creating, singing, and writing songs since I was little. But I’ve also been engaged in a more capitalist professional world of arts since I was 13 or 14. Before, I would call myself an independent artist. Sometimes it still might come out that way, as a way of differentiating myself from the machine of major labels and this big machine that exists in the music industry. But now I like to call myself an “interdependent artist.” And that is because I am in mycelial networks and relationships with other interdependent or independent artists who are now in network with me. It’s through these relationships that I’ve been able to unlearn colonial frameworks and lean into the safety of imagining and co-creating something different.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sania Khan.