TPA’s Dann Chinn covers all bases in this long chat with Michael Woodman, who gives us the lowdown on his new album Hiss of Today, and much, much more besides…
Dann Chinn (DC): Let’s talk about stories, Michael, and storytelling, since Hiss of Today is full of stories but doesn’t approach them in a straightforward way. This isn’t the first time you’ve done this…
Michael Woodman (MW): You’re absolutely right — I’ve used this storytelling approach many times before. I think the best way to express this is to think back to my experience of watching films on Alex Cox’s Moviedrome, when I was too young to understand what was going on. I’d come away from several hours of watching something like Repo Man, Brazil, or The Quiet Earth, having absorbed the visuals and atmosphere, but the narrative remained dream-like. Similar to trying to play a computer game before you’re old enough to read the manual. You brute-force your way through, projecting your ideas onto what’s happening. The idea of creating something that would manufacture a “dream-logic” experience for the listener has always been in my mind.
There are certainly books or films with strong narrative twists that have really appealed to me over the years, but the things that stay with me over time are those that create a palpable atmosphere. That thread runs through all the media I consume — whether it’s games, films, or fiction. I’m more interested in the feeling of the world being created; narrative is secondary.
That’s not to say that in Hiss of Today, there isn’t a lot of narrative being expressed. There are specific references that might seem like stream-of-consciousness but are actually rooted in concrete things; like the supposed magical battle between Aleister Crowley and members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn on Blythe Road outside the Isis-Urania Temple, or Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers trying to send out a “punitive current of magickal will” to destroy his enemies by rattling dried peas in a sieve.
But these references are (obviously) weirdly chosen, delivered in elliptical ways, and smooshed together with my own experiences of nostalgia — a big part of it is me trying to communicate the feeling of buying a £1.50 book on occultism in my local bookshop in Redhill and realising, far too young, that one of the founding members of the Golden Dawn had the same surname as me and died on my birthday.
(DC): Ah yes, the nostalgic element. Much more evident in Hiss of Today — not just in the album itself, but in its promotional aspects; including a full-on, old-school computer text adventure blending suburban ennui with existential horror and occult history…
(MW): Yeah — there has been a deliberate obtuseness to my marketing approach. In a world where we are all trying to shout above the noise ceiling of social media, why not deliberately gate the album’s first single behind a nonsensical text adventure?
It was actually the prompting and support from ex-Thumpermonkey bass player Mike Hutchinson, (who did the album art and helped with the text adventure, and is now chief architect at Planetsmasher Games ) that convinced me to make it. To be honest, I was astonished by how many people played and enjoyed it, and it’s still available if anyone wants a free copy of the first single, Lychgate.
(DC): I managed to finish the adventure myself. It certainly taught me something about being home-alone in 1990s Redhill, and how not to talk to cranky old mages; although I’m not sure how much of it I understood…
(MW): Strangely, another strong influence is an old ZX Spectrum game that feels like it should be an artefact dreamed up for an old Thumpermonkey album — it’s a game called Heavy On The Magick Critically, I was never able to play it; I just read about it in a magazine at the time. I was also becoming aware of William Robert Woodman.
It appears to offer a stylised and somewhat tongue-in-cheek depiction of Thelemic magick, borrowing surface-level aesthetics and terminology rather than presenting a deeply accurate portrayal, which, if I’m honest, is what Hiss of Today is doing in any case. My attempts to play it on modern emulators have ended in confusion given the bizarre control system, so at least for the moment, the nostalgia and my projections of what it might actually contain are preserved.
(DC): I remember that one — I was a Spectrum kid in the mid-1980s, and at the time it seemed that there was a real creative and expressive explosion in games culture for that little 8-bit machine in particular… It can be interesting catching up in the present day with some of the characters who did the programming, or spun the business. They were often marketed as slightly cartoonish stars in the computer-leisure press of the time, but many years later, the ones who are still active or pursuable in interviews reveal a more complicated backstory.
(MW): Well — I did actually do a cursory bit of research to see if either [Heavy on the Magick programmers] Greg Follis or Royston Carter had any kind of social media presence, but as far as I can see, they appear to have become lost in the lower reaches of the Sothic Complex.
(DC): Is there a conscious choice to “edit out the author”, or one to disguise yourself? You’ve said that you’ve mixed in actual narratives which you’ve discovered but blended them with personal nostalgic recollections, which sounds as if you’re personally dipping in and out of the narratives. So you have various options available, including re-telling other people’s eerie stories, or inserting yourself as a kind of subjective documentarian, or using the original accounts as a springboard for flights of fancy and different methods of portrayal. As you’ve suggested, all very cinematic.
(MW): There’s always been a deliberate warping of personal experience when it crops up in anything creative I do — I’m conscious of really wanting to draw on this but to repackage it somehow.
Maybe part of this relates to two things David Lynch talked about — giving the audience ‘room to dream’ (ie project their own experience and associations), but also returning to what you are frequently making to check in on whether it still evokes the feeling you had when you first had the idea of making it, and always trying to make sure that whatever redrafting takes place still honours that. Also, many of the images I’m drawing on are so deeply personal that I deliberately obfuscate them to reduce their specificity in the hope that people can project their resonances onto them while still preserving the feel of it.
Redrafting is often associated with bringing more specificity; I think it’s possible to purge the original vibe. That’s not to say I don’t agree with redrafting; far from it. What I write is always heavily manipulated and rewritten, certainly lyrically, even if it still ends up looking like a stream of consciousness to some people.
All this gets stirred up together. Narrative beats, such as they are, are experienced through proximity with each other rather than any kind of linear narrative thrust, like a choose-your-own-adventure. Everything is intertextual and hyperlinked, which feels meaningful when I’m writing an album about nostalgia, where one recollection sparks and tumbles into another tangential memory.
(DC): You’ve been telling strange stories in musical form ever since early Thumpermonkey days. I think that there are even a few on Hitchhikers May Be Escaping Inmates [the debut Thumpermonkey release, in 2001]. That EP’s more of a quick-cut multi-form sound collage than a series of songs, admittedly, but even on there there are fragments of spoken-word story — an encounter with the Devil on a tube train, bits of slapstick occult thriller, and what sound like fleeting chunks of a radio play. It’s all very parodic and game-like, somewhere between an esoteric sitcom and Dada, with the wit and spoofery very much to the forefront; but it’s interesting that even at that early stage you were playing around with texts in a way that challenged the music and the idea of what a song should be.
(MW): I put this almost entirely down to hanging out in a friend’s garage listening to the original radio broadcast of Chris Morris’s Blue Jam. Not the CD, which was pretty abbreviated, but the full episodes, which were importantly contextualised by the very specific music programming and had so much more content.
(DC): Blue Jam had a much more sinister undercurrent than Morris’ previous work, didn’t it? Partly it was those queasy-ambient musical textures, playing continuously — a bit like a hypnagogic emergency siren — but it was also a move away from his news spoofery. Its world was much more immersive and off-kilter: in some respects, more child-like and workaday but also threatening, shot through with out-of-control feelings, motivations and impulses, and with an unsettling sense that the unexplained was bleeding through. Again, it’s Lynchian… and as with much of his work, it’s playful…
(MW): It’s an almost indescribable tone, I find — the sort of thing that I perhaps mistakenly felt I wanted to emulate in a number of different contexts, and that’s not always successful. What it is trying to achieve is so singular.
Frustratingly, Blue Jam seems to have vanished into the memory hole; even more so than some of the most obscure Spectrum games, which is saying something. I suspect licensing issues, particularly around the music, might be to blame. The only versions that seem to exist publicly are on YouTube, but the music has been stripped out, which absolutely reduces the whole experience.
(DC): If I’m correct… at that point (the Hitchhikers…EP) you were mostly playing guitar in a surf/glam-rock band called Brand Violet in which perhaps you hadn’t had much to do with direction and song-writing?
(MW): It was a very different band with a retro surf aesthetic, but as it had such a specific remit as far as the sound was concerned, it was pretty easy to change gears creatively to suit the band’s vibe. I was actually pretty involved in the song-writing alongside the bass player and founder member, Kevin.
This would have been in the early noughties and could accurately be described as my first ‘proper’ band. It was a bit of a whirlwind because not long after forming the band, we briefly got signed by Some Bizzare — so technically, I was signed to the same record label as Marc Almond, The The, and Einsturzende Neubauten. Another fun fact is that Brand Violet’s singer, Sally, was also the vocalist on Move Your Body (Elevation) by Xpansions.
I was doing early solo Thumpermonkey stuff at the same time, and inevitably, I gravitated towards that project in the end. I think the last song Brand Violet ever did together, Rail Thin, was actually recorded by Brian James from The Damned in a Brighton cliffside studio. I would probably have moved on to an early three-piece incarnation of Thumpermonkey shortly after that.
(DC): Prior to that three-piece, though, Thumpermonkey remained a poorly-disguised solo project for several more years, didn’t it? (across three albums — 2003’s Alpha Romeo, 2004’s Pig Heart, 2006’s Chap With the Wings, Five Rounds Rapid). There was a definite aesthetic emerging even then – assorted bits of extreme metal and what you might call “avant-hard”; a sort of bricolage/”rapidly weld things together” aspect of progressive rock in the Mike Patton vein (Mr Bungle, Fantomas); a teasing dance around occultism and, again, bits of story drama.
(MW): Only Alpha Romeo and Pigheart are solo, actually — Chap… marked the addition of Mike Hutchinson (whom I mentioned earlier), plus drummer Dave Croshaw (who now has this Wolf Eyes-plus-Brian-Eno-in-a-washing-machine thing called Cheyne Stokes. And yeah — I was probably listening to Disco Volante on repeat in 2003/2004, and trying to find a home for all the stuff that wasn’t suitable for Brand Violet, which to an extent, probably made me, for better or worse, more experimental than I’ll ever be again. It was certainly a period when I didn’t question what I was doing.
There was certainly no real technical knowledge at that point. Bizarrely, I was actually assembling the tracks in Propellerhead Reason, which was much more a dance music thing — it had a very tactile interface where you could patch virtual cables between synths, samplers, drum machines, and effects, all of which looked and behaved like their hardware counterparts, but importantly — you couldn’t record audio into it, so any guitar tracks or vocals were triggered as samples at the appropriate points in a drum machine. Absolutely ridiculous.
I think I resisted investigating a classic recording platform for ages, mainly because I really liked the sound of the compressors in that software (or at least I found it easy to achieve the effect I was going for, which was to squash drums samples to the point of destruction because I thought I’d heard Nigel Godrich doing something similar).
(DC): People might have expected you to be the dominant, directing, even despotic figure within Thumpermonkey. You founded it; you’re clearly not short of musical ideas; and when the other members joined, you’d already got the aesthetic established and an almost limitless body of inspirations and ideas for wording to draw on. In spite of that, your past-and-present bandmates have spoken happily about what an incredibly democratic band it actually is. Everyone’s allowed to contribute riffs and ideas for each other’s instruments; no-one jealously guards their space; and apparently the only reason that you write all of the lyrics is that you have to sing them. The mutual respect and affection is obvious.
It’s unusual that you all seem to have managed to do that so seamlessly, and also unusual that someone with such a strong musical and textual vision as yours — plus an already-proven ability to execute it — can manage to offer such space to your bandmates. Thoughts?
(MW): I think that probably early solo Thumpermonkey was a pretty helpful statement of intent in the sense that it started conversations with musicians who seemed to like the same sort of excess, and from there, considerations about how comfortable any of the various members have been operating in each other’s spaces never came up.
There are maybe a couple of reasons for this. If somebody takes a half-formed idea of mine and then distorts it into something else — or adds another layer — with the right musicians, that has almost always felt additive; and the goal, I guess, is to sublimate everyone’s personalities into a single hive mind working from the exact unspoken blueprint or design sheet.
I have never been great at jamming out ideas because I feel very self-conscious in that setting. In contrast, the most effective way for Thumpermonkey was always file sharing so that you were working with a nugget of sound that was divorced totally from its author — it became a game, effectively a game of Consequences, where your goal is to take a musical thought and recontextualise it for the amusement of others. With the right attitude, it’s a very social way of working, and I don’t think individual egos came into it much.
A pretty helpful framing device was the Nicholas Dobson & Michael Mellender ‘20-Song Game’ (linked to the Immersion Composition Society, which challenges all band members to write twenty songs in one day, and then to come together and play all of the material they have come up with. Inevitably, this results in a lot of hilarity, but it’s OK to laugh because everyone understands that the pressure to get ideas down is immense. Inevitably, there are one or two ideas that are great, that get turned into proper songs. In that sense, it was a natural progression for a group of musicians who all grew steadily more comfortable working together — it’s the switch to solo stuff that is harder because suddenly, you have total responsibility.
(DC): Anyone who’s listened to your records and then got to meet you for the first time might be forgiven for expecting some sort of haughty prog/avant-metal darklord, intimidating people with a slew of knowledge. Instead, everyone who does meet you actually encounters a rather gentle, humble man; even a diffident one…
(MW): I honestly don’t really believe anyone would consider me a haughty prog/avant-metal darklord, but then I have very little machinery to reliably detect what is going on in the outside world.
Honestly, a lot of my earlier musical output is what I style as a series of elaborate jokes with no punchlines – but as I say, I spend so much time in my weird little world that I honestly thought, (as with every record I write) that Hiss of Today was my crossover pop album, and yet everyone I know and love is praising it for how weird it is.
So, for the record, I am absolutely diffident. Context influences the scale of humbleness to a large degree. I think that any creative person constantly swings between absolutely thinking that something they have done is astonishing and hating every word that has ever come out of their mouth.
(DC): Regardless of the “darklord” thing (I was kidding a little, there), probably a far more important component of your work and the way in which it presents to the world is that there’s a lot of humour in it. You mentioned “elaborate jokes with no punchlines”; you mentioned comically eccentric ways of music-making which actually make your work more difficult for yourself; you’ve mentioned amusement as being an integral aspect of collaboration even on heavier music. Even after the full-band Thumpermonkey coalesced and began making a more grounded, contemplative music (and certainly the most recent Thumpermonkey, Make Me Young etc., was a pretty serious affair), there were certainly still more than a few dark chuckles, textual jokes or wry side-eyings in your music. This is whether it’s more outright examples like the pomposity of the warring magician in The Button or the parodying/deconstruction of email frauds in 419; or the implicit humour and parody that’s never too far away in proudly brainy, geeky music, regardless of how intense or powerful it might be otherwise.
I’m not sure whether it’s exclusively a British thing, but humour (especially in music) can be a bit of a minefield. As a musician in particular, it seems that it’s easy to crack the wrong sort of joke, sometimes without knowing exactly what you’ve done, and then all of a sudden you’re corralled into some kind of nerdy comedy-band box and it’s very difficult to get out of it. Similarly, if you poke well-deserved fun at assorted heroic cultural postures (to pick a few examples — rock gods, self-styled prog sages, the more pompous exponents of the revolt-into-style brigade, or indeed any public persona which seems to take itself much too seriously) it can sometimes backfire on you and render you diminished. I was wondering how you, with your clear sense of humour, dealt with this sort of situation or avoided the pitfalls associated with it.
(MW): It’s not something that’s totally straightforward to answer. That question might be best explored not only in the context of my listening habits as a teenager, but also in the kind of filmic and literary references I was absorbing at the time. So I’ll give you two answers.
The arguably less pompous one is that this is just what happens when you grow up listening to quite “technical” music, for want of a better phrase. That kind of listening naturally leads you to absorb as many genre influences as you can. Inevitably, Faith No More had a way of articulating this that feels, to me, like the most commercially viable end of a specific spectrum. On Angel Dust, they’d have hit singles with Lionel Richie covers, and then Mike Patton would start screaming, and there would be a Kronos Quartet Shostakovich sample — and all of this was delivered with a straight face. I wasn’t immune to that kind of delivery, partly because it alienated a lot of people I knew who were either into metal or more popular music.
Then there’s Disco Volante by Mr. Bungle. When my young brain was absorbing a single album that veered through death metal, jazz, musique concrète, easy listening, klezmer, tango…the desire to juxtapose unusual things became normalised and sort of got divorced from the idea that it could be interpreted as a “joke”. I fixated on the technical aspects of what was going on. Again, the delivery remains completely po-faced regardless of how ludicrous the content is, and that seems to be a key factor.
I was probably reading a lot of Vonnegut at the time as well, probably Catch-22 as well, along with a fair amount of Philip K. Dick. There’s something very destabilising about the way these authors blend humour and terror that seemed very attractive to me tonally. Again, these sorts of juxtapositions just seemed quite natural to me.
I wouldn’t say there was much over-analysis in terms of trying to make sure the jokes “land”. Certainly, with earlier Thumpermonkey material, musically as much as lyrically, it was just a case of aspiring to something and hoping for the best. I think Psithurism was an experiment in trying to get as far away from that approach as possible. With Hiss of Today, it’s starting to creep back in again.
The Wandering Nerve from the album (a direct translation of the vagus nerve) is, let’s face it, a deliberately horrible piece of music. When I explain that it’s supposed to be a sonic representation of what it feels like to exist in my own nervous system, people tend to look at me in a very funny way. They don’t know whether to laugh or not. I find that, in and of itself, very funny.
At the same time, (as I keep suggesting, somewhat defensively), I have a very bad radar for whether something I write is accessible or not. The truth is, I’ll keep trying to write what I perceive to be pop music, with weird humour hidden in the subtext. Inevitably, I’m grateful when reviews are positive, but they all tend to suggest something along the lines of “this is psychedelic music, but not as we know it”; which I concede, post-album release, is probably accurate. The weirdness is clearly the text rather than the subtext, and I just have to make peace with that.
A slightly more pompous answer to your question might relate to my fixation on a particular Philip K. Dick quote. He’s a writer who deliberately used pulp sci-fi tropes as a kind of Trojan horse for complex philosophical ideas. He writes: “The symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.”
I’ve always been really taken with that idea. It’s not just a comment on how high concepts can be embedded in lowbrow forms. It’s also a kind of spiritual vindication of the absurd. The idea that the profound might first manifest not in sanctified forms but in the overlooked, the discarded, or the ridiculous. Overreaching box-office-dud follies by notable directors, critically lambasted concept albums, awkward moments of unintended comedy: there’s often gold in there, for me at least. Sometimes it’s the weird detour, the tonal misfire, or the structurally incoherent bit that suddenly opens a portal to something more profound. Humour, in that sense, is not just levity. It becomes a sort of piercing of the veil between realities, a space where something uncanny can slip through.
(DC): Would it be a good description of you to say that you love tropes, but hate cliches?
(MW): Yes, though I’d maybe say I’m keen to try and subvert tropes, and I’m wary of clichés when they feel like shortcuts that bypass something more emotionally honest.
I’ve always been drawn to genre and its trappings (maybe more so outside of music), whether that’s speculative fiction or the aesthetic language of Spectrum games, but I’m most engaged when familiar structures are used as a launchpad for something uncanny, personal, or surprising. On Hiss of Today, I play a lot with the language of hauntology, 8-bit nostalgia, and occult symbolism, not because I want to wallow in retro pastiche, but to reflect on how memory, identity, and feelings of nostalgia get encoded over time.
(DC): As I recall, when Thumpermonkey were emerging as a live act (and temporarily working under the name “Thumpermonkey Lives!”), the band was coming up via some unusual but enjoyable and freer-minded music scenes which were some way off the beaten track. I believe that there was something called “the Tooting Bizarre”, and later on there was Roastfest the Believers Roast all-dayer set up by Kavus Torabi. My knowledge is a little spotty here. Enlighten me about what those days were like, what they meant to, what they’ve given to you and left you with.
(MW): Yes — The ‘Lives!’ addition to Thumpermonkey was really just a way of drawing a line between the earlier recordings (which were basically just me), and what we were becoming: a functioning live band. We dropped the suffix after a couple of albums, but at the time it felt important to signal that shift.
Tooting Bizarre was a loose collective of friends, mostly based in and around Tooting in south London, all making weird, experimental music. Ironically, we never actually put on any shows in Tooting itself. The main venue we used was The Miller in London Bridge. Thumpermonkey played loads of shows there. The idea was that each of us would take turns booking a night and curating the lineup. We put on early shows by bands that became much more established — Japanese psych band Bo Ningen for starters, and I’m pretty sure we had Teeth of the Sea on a bill once too, before they became more widely known. My friend Gareth Thomas was also heavily involved — he was in a fantastic band called The Mayors of Miyazaki, who really captured Tooting’s own flavour of that early-2000s Discord-era math rock scene. They’re no longer active, which is a shame, but Gareth’s still going strong in USA Nails. It was a very fun, very drunken enterprise; definitely keen to promote music we were excited about, but also very much rooted in being a kind of boozy commune first and foremost.
Things shifted after Tooting Bizarre wrapped up. Thumpermonkey ended up playing a show at The Unicorn in Kentish Town, promoted by Matthew Rozeik of the now also-sadly-silent Astrohenge . We were supporting Knifeworld that night, and I think that’s when Kavus Torabi first took notice of us. He later agreed to put out our album Sleep Furiously on his label, Believers Roast. Roastfest came along not long after that, around 2011. There was a Believers Roast compilation called The Central Element, which featured an earlier mix of Wheezyboy (Thumpermonkey’s *cough* big hit single). Between the compilation, the Roastfest lineup, and the album release, that period really marked a transition for us. We were suddenly sharing stages with people like Knifeworld, William D Drake and Stars in Battledress It felt like we’d arrived somewhere. And that’s also when the ever-supportive folk at Prog Magazine started to take notice and support us, which meant a lot.
(DC): Let’s pull in a few people who work in a similar field to you.
I can’t not mention Thom Yorke, and Radiohead in general. A songwriter and band which keep getting held up as the figurehead for “New Prog” or post-progressive in general, no matter how fast they try to flee from it. There are many post-Radiohead bands with fairly obvious debts paid; I don’t see that so much in you, but I see something similar in the strange arpeggiations and progressions which you use, and something in the deliberate disjointing of narrative in order to catch an uneasy picture. In a roundabout way, all of that seems to have been amplified in the solo songs.
(MW): Radiohead were a huge part of my experience of listening to music in the ‘90s and early noughties, though I was an odd enough kid that I was probably rinsing The Bends and OK Computer at the same time as Angel Dust and King for a Day, Fool for a Lifetime by Faith No More in a way that would have probably disgusted hardcore fans of either band. The one I really go back and listen to with regularity, though, is Kid A, which in turn was paying its debts to Scott Walker (I’m pretty sure the uncomfortable cluster of strings on How to Disappear Completely is referencing It’s Raining Today).
(DC): I thought of a few other possible parallels. Bob Drake has been creating albums of short, complex, tangly garage-prog songs which simultaneously spoof and celebrate weird fiction, junk horror and American Gothic. Humour’s a big part of it — a kind of loveable grotesquerie. Then there’s Peter Hammill, coming out of ‘60s pop, a Jesuit education, and a fairly naked Gothic literary tradition. He seems to have developed his influences constructively in a similar way to you — never shackled to them, and balancing a scientific or systematic awareness with a wonder and alarm at the human condition. Finally, Jon Higgs of Everything Everything — someone else who’s into connections, associations and the human animal: how the naked consciousness is impacted on by technology and by information age modes of thinking. He also has a tendency to cram huge amounts of information and intimation into modern pop songs: a sort of modern proggie even if he doesn’t use so many of the trad proggie forms.
(MW): That’s such a rich set of comparisons. I’m familiar with those artists in passing, though not deeply. I’ve heard great things about Bob Drake and Thinking Plague and should explore them further. Everything Everything and Van Der Graaf Generator have hovered on the periphery of my listening, and I understand why people have drawn comparisons between their work and mine in the past. If I were to highlight an artist who perhaps occupies a similar space (someone on the fringes of what fans might consider progressive music, and a bit Marmite when fully expressing their personality), I’d probably point to Scott Walker.
(DC): You’ve often cited late-career Walker — the run of albums between 1984’s Climate of Hunter and his final 2014 collaboration with Sunn O))) on Soused, plus the Brady Corbet film scores The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux — as an influence. You’ve even covered at least one Walker song in concert (Sleepwalkers Woman from Climate of Hunter, unless I’m very much mistaken). How do you correlate with him?
(MW): Hugely important to me. I was aware of his ‘60’s output, but then I was presented with Tilt one night (by the same friend who had introduced me to Blue Jam) — it was the classic cycle of screwing up my face in confusion, but then, months later only being able to scratch the itch in my brain by returning to the album again and again. I probably watched the Leos Carax film Pola X, where Walker’s music is used around a similar time, which only amplified the itch.
He operates in an extraordinary space at the intersection of a lot of things; I know there is humour in there (especially in later works), and there’s a real tension set up that a lot of artists I gravitate towards seem to exploit; again the Vonnegut/Philip K. Dick vibe where I feel lyrically, the humour is threaded in with the terror in such an unorthodox way. This results in some luminous moments that it would have been hard to get to my “normal” means – and I just keep thinking about the Camus quote – “A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” Very little music allows me to access these kinds of emotions, and there are moments on Tilt and Climate of Hunter that perfectly “take me there”.
(DC): I know that you’ve already mentioned — among others — Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Shudder to Think, King Crimson, Mastodon, Deerhoof and Magma as partial inspirations for Thumpermonkey music; so there’s a whole basket of different approaches and genre types there. The press release for Hiss of Today mentions Vangelis and baroque chamber pop, both of which provide pretty broad fields for inspiration, while Psithurism, if I’m right, sometimes referred to 1970s psychedelic folk…
(MW): Oh, sure. If I had to tie the influence of specific artists to some tracks on Hiss of Today, I think I could probably have a fair stab at that. Whether or not the influence is apparent in the music, I was probably thinking about Pixies/solo Frank Black at the end of The Button. On The Wandering Nerve, I was very obviously ripping off Requiem by Beat-era Crimson (the ‘80s Belew incarnation of King Crimson remains my favourite flavour). On Telomeres, I was probably thinking about ASVA. I’m pretty sure there’s a chord shift with a Lydian vibe that is nabbed directly from Futurists Against the Ocean, and vocally, I was probably thinking about Toby Driver’s contributions to Presences of Absences.
No Moon, No Throne is an odd one – it grew out of seeing how far I could push my technology — i.e. could I construct a complete song that satisfied me just using a single repeating drum sample, a looper, and my Boss MS-3 [multi-effects pedalboard] — and the weird Thelemic lore felt more instructive as far as influencing how the whole thing came together; though mining the whole hauntology vibe led me to return to The Noise Made by People by Broadcast and Chemistry is What We Are by Simian, as well as digging into more recent stuff on Ghost Box Records, (i.e. Belbury Poly). I wouldn’t say that these influences are ‘loud’ on the album, but they nudged me in a specific direction I wouldn’t have otherwise travelled in.
(DC): Lore and texts aside, tell me a little bit about how your songs form (regardless of whether they’re collaborations with Rael, Ben, Sam and other Thumpermonkeys or your solo work). You don’t do obvious verse-chorus-verse-middle-eight/bridge — like standard pop, folk or jazz — nor do you do programmatic/movement/sonata forms like classic prog or like pre-modernist classical music. Also, while (as mentioned earlier) early solo-Thumpermonkey did follow something of a cut-up, post-modernist/post-metal, self-consciously disorientating and experimental format of ferocious stylistic, textural and structural shifts within single pieces, you seem to have abandoned the more blatant aspects of that as well.
Sometimes, though, the strange progressions and shiftings which you do use suggest some kind of passage through a story, or through a view of part of a story.the move through a story. How does it work? Without clear marker points how can you tell, when you’re writing, whether something’s working or not, and whether and when something’s reached completion?
(MW): Writing happens in all kinds of different ways, but one consistent characteristic is that the spark of inspiration is usually, quite unromantically, a technical consideration or idea, rather than the muse dropping a fully formed song and accompanying narrative into my head.
Returning to No Moon, No Throne, I was exploring the functionality of my gear, and the thought was: “What if I could mix a drum loop so it doesn’t distort when it’s coming out mono through a guitar amp, and find as many ways as possible to take that short, repeated rhythmic element and build a song structure that doesn’t feel like something jammed out on a looper, or like I’m just playing along to a backing track?”
This kind of constraint inevitably leads to creative decisions, and the song’s “narrative” tends to arrive later. My head usually swims with ideas, floating around in vitro, and it can take time for my brain to find the right vehicle for them.
Ninety per cent of the time, that vehicle is a straightforward thought: “Can I find a use for this specific effect I’ve built?” “I like song X; what if I tried a similar approach?” or even, “What if I wrote a really simplified vocal melody but experimented with how complex I could make the chord sequence underneath it?”
More often than not, an early expression of that sort of idea creates something for these free-floating images and ideas to latch onto; and from there, it’s a very organic process.
(DC): I’ve foisted a few artist comparisons on you earlier, but do you feel a kinship or creative sympathy with anyone in particular? Not necessarily just your peers, collaborators and gigmates, but artists across the fields of music and other disciplines. Perhaps just in terms of approaching work and getting things done?
(MW): I can talk about things I like, but when it comes to citing creative kinship or sympathy in how people approach their work and get things done, that’s a bit trickier. Many people in my immediate creative circle, like me, have a complicated relationship with creativity. Like me, they often find it hard to articulate that in detail. I’m also not the kind of person who instinctively sets out to analyse other musicians’ processes, apart from, as mentioned, the Immersion Composition Society’s way of doing things.
(DC): I’ll not badger you about it, then… <laughs>
(MW): As for stuff I have connected with recently, I’ve been enjoying music by Teleplasmiste and The Utopia Strong I guess I have aspirations towards that kind of composition. Not only is it immensely pleasurable to listen to, but it speaks to an organic, mindful, almost spiritual composition process focused on texture and “nowness” that really appeals to me. I imagine it’s a very social way of constructing music, focusing on camaraderie through non-verbal communication.
There are a few side projects by members of larger groups that I’ve connected with on a pretty visceral level recently. In a rare triumph for the algorithm, streaming services recently served up Rubber Oh’s latest album Soil, (Sam Grant from Pigs X 7), a really strange but enormously melodic and hummable cocktail of filthy, hard-panned basses, folk-horror strings and choral arrangements. I’m also a bit obsessed with Pili Coit’s album Love Everywhere, (featuring Poil drummer Guilhem Meier) – it’s the perfect balance of post-punk melodic hooks and R.I.O. tinged syncopation.
Elder’s Innate Passage has also cheered me up enormously over the last year or so.
(DC): Maybe you could tell me about your creative life from a more personal perspective, and in a framework which works better for you.
(MW): Understanding my relationship with creativity has taken a long time, and it’s still evolving. It’s never been a straightforward joy machine, more like a relationship with a complicated friend: sometimes thrilling, sometimes demanding, and occasionally toxic. Early experiences with music tuition weren’t ideal. Over time, creativity became entangled with pressure and self-criticism, especially when I felt I had to prove something or meet arbitrary benchmarks.
In making this album, I’ve tried to give myself more space to explore and rediscover a sense of play. That was the main reason I chose to work with Christian Browning at Big Seas Productions. He was looking to expand his production work and hone his craft, and at the same time, I was trying to reconnect with the writing process rather than obsess over the outcome.
I’ve known Christian for a while, and we consciously decided to treat Hiss of Today as not just an album, but as a collaborative space to tackle tricky production questions and deepen our creative relationship. At the heart of it was a shared understanding: these experiences and connections are ultimately more meaningful than the end product itself.
(DC): That goes back to what you said earlier about the harmonious collaborative nature of Thumpermonkey as a band — about beneficial human interaction being more rewarding than the simple gratification of ego. Do you see it as part of a journey in itself — with things like positive interactions, whether measurable or simply felt, being as important as the usual material markers and flags of progress which artists and bands make for themselves?
(MW): It’s honestly become the most important thing. Modern culture is heavily geared toward gamifying communication through social media. It rarely prioritises meaningful relationships. While it’s fantastic that current technology allows us to reach a wider audience, it’s easy to get caught up in internalised ideas of success or failure defined by advertising platforms, especially when your creative work doesn’t align with what’s currently popular.
In that sense, reclaiming a meditative, present-centred approach to creativity becomes much easier when you focus on the relationships you build along the way. That’s especially true of the connections I’ve had with Christian during the mixing process, as well as with Teddy Powell, who directed both videos for this release. That’s not to dismiss the vital process of making your work visible, but I’ll always cherish the memory of laughing hysterically while being dragged into the woods by puppets far more than the number of likes on an Instagram post.
(DC): And — heading back to a central theme of the album — is there something Thelemic about this process?
(MW): Yes and no…
(DC): Just to keep things clearer — we’ve been tossing some recurring esoteric terms around during the conversation which could do with a little more exploration and explanation. So, for readers unfamiliar with those terms…
“Hauntology” is used to define a situation (or a feeling) when the past is bleeding into the present in terms of cultural themes and aesthetics — old styles, old ways of looking at things, old visual and aural signals which make us remember our own childhoods. This also encompasses times which we’ve not experienced personally but have only imagined through handling or absorbing old items, be they objects, yellowing old books, vintage film, elderly radio or television broadcasts, etc. There’s some element of comfort in this, but also unease — as if we’re being haunted by the ghosts of our symbolic past rather than vengeful human spirits.
It’s a way of approaching and perceiving things which has worked its way into art. In film and television, it has included contemporary hallucinatory folk horror offerings such as A Field in England, or (at the other end of seriousness) Quentin Smirhes’ unsettling and darkly funny Youtube shorts which suggest 1970s TV children’s programming gone wrong. In music, people tend to cite it in connection with 1990s bands creating an eerie retrospective sound, texture and implications, such as Broadcast, Portishead, Pram… perhaps some of the more sample-oriented post-rock bands of the time, like Moonshake. More recently, it’s been continued (as you’ve mentioned above) in the work of various musicians releasing via Ghost Box Records artists and in that of sound artists like The Caretaker who made a six-and-a-half hour concept album in 2016 about encroaching dementia using slowly degenerating crackly vinyl recordings of old ballroom music (which he referred to, rather ominously, as “a remembering” although it was actually about forgetting and the attendant disintegration of personality).
There’s a lot more to it than that, of course, both philosophically and in terms of the investigation of actual history. However, I’ll leave it at that for the moment; although I should also add that, in art, hauntology seems to usually be noted as being a particularly British phenomenon, for some reason; perhaps because of particular tendencies within British nostalgia.
“Thelemic magic”, on the other hand, is the process of an individual developing and reaching their complete potential via various symbolic rituals, deliberate practises and acts of will. It’s got a strong connection with desire, and with breaking free of social restrictions for your own benefit and completeness. A strict Judaeo-Christian perspective will usually associate it with straightforward devil worship; but actual practitioners will counter that it’s either encounters with entities with set, defined and necessary cosmological roles; or, alternately, a set of psychological metaphors which you act out in order to achieve something greater. You’ve already mentioned some of the past practitioners, and your younger encounters with books by or about them which had already passed through several sets of hands simply by passing through the second-hand book trade.
Sorry, I couldn’t really keep all of that shorter or less complex. But the intersection between those two ideas is quite an interesting one. A potential dovetailing. So that’s what you were exploring? Earlier, you were mentioning wanting to avoid pastiche; and, just now, investigating the encoding of memory?
(MW): Yeah, I suppose there is an overlap between hauntology and Thelema in the sense that both involve opening yourself up to randomness, or strange signals — letting weird things in. That said, any thematic through-line on Hiss of Today owes more to my own peculiar personality than to any formal system. I did immerse myself in hauntological aesthetics for a while (and A Field in England is probably my favourite Ben Wheatley film, with Kill List not far behind for its occult weirdness). Still, anyone expecting a Broadcast album is going to be sorely disappointed!
The Thelemic stuff came in through a much more personal route. The coincidence of a founding member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn having the same surname as me and dying on my birthday sent me down a rabbit hole as a kid, and it led me to think if similar coincidences or perceived synchronicities were the founding sparks of inspiration for those who decide to devise their own system of magickal workings.
When I first came across books about the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, I didn’t really grasp the deeper spiritual or cultural weight behind them — I treated them more like Dungeons & Dragons bestiaries than anything else. As I got older, I started to realise how layered — and, in some cases, problematic — the roots of that material could be. Traditions like Thelema have drawn heavily on systems like Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and Egyptian mythology, often without clear cultural lineage or context, which raises complicated questions about appropriation and reinterpretation.
That’s part of what’s going on in the track The Button, which reflects on the Thelemic idea of changing reality through the force of will, but reframes it through a very British, sometimes uncomfortably colonial, lens. I’m not a believer in the traditional sense, but I’m fascinated by the stories we build, and how belief, even second-hand or symbolic belief, can shape a space, an atmosphere, or a person.
(DC): If one is a fan of the simmering stew of weird fiction (for the sake of argument, I’m also roping weird cinema, surrealistic painting and other fantastical art forms into this category) and if one’s also wanting to create one’s own contribution to the tradition, there’s often the risk of creating something which is either pompous or parodic.
For example, on the one hand, there’s the kind of gothic, prog or metal album which plays everything straight down the line — no sophistication, a sort of puppet-show version of the idea which seems fixed on pitching the story in bullet points and stances, and all of it really clean. On the other, there are those bleak parchment-y records sometimes made by underground post-punkers and fierce old counter-culture hippies, those ones who think of themselves as chaos magicians — full of drones, chants and industrial loops, all texture and attitude. A blur of showmanship and aggressive self-styled authenticity: you often suspect that it’s all mystery and mummery dedicated to preserving an image or defining them as being counter to some orthodoxy or other.
Sometimes a musician or band will write one of these albums and manage to pull off something with sort of continued resonance or relevance. More often, though, they seem more concerned with the surface qualities of mysticism, or surrealism, or legend. It ends up as a sort of rich jam or sauce, which they then spread as thinly as they can across a lengthy product, then repeat again at intervals.
As a self-professed fan of — and contributor to — genre weirdness, you don’t seem to do that. I was wondering how you avoided the temptations and pitfalls of doing it.
(MW): That’s a really interesting question because deliberately ignoring the core mechanics of established magickal practice was a conscious decision.
I became more interested in world-building with my own symbolic and constructed rituals (as exemplified in my slightly absurd text adventure), not out of dismissal of traditional forms, but because I was curious about what happens when those forms start to fray; how ideas distort in memory, how complexity erodes as they’re passed on, reinterpreted, or shaped to fit the will, limitations, or biases of the individual. So while it might be easy to view that approach as a kind of evasion or cop-out, a lot of effort went into deciding what to leave out. In a way, this is ostensibly an album about the surface qualities of mysticism; what lingers when the scaffolding is stripped away.
That said, I’m not at all immune to the appeal of artists who frame their performances as rituals rather than gigs—especially those working at the more extreme edges of audio where the physical sensation of sound becomes almost sacramental: Sunn O))) and ASVA, for example. Whether that response is tied to something I lost when consciously lapsing my Catholicism, or simply to my love of theatre and deep commitment to a concept or persona, I’m not sure. But I think that ambiguity is part of the point. I’m drawn to that liminal space where performance, belief, and sensory experience blur, not because I think it reveals some ultimate truth, but because it allows for a kind of resonance on an instinctive, less defined level.
(DC): I was going to ask whether you were concerned about making magickal, mythical and peculiar preoccupations credible outside of their existing bases… but you seem to have moved quite a way beyond any of that being important.
So, if anything, perhaps your work is more about mining the depths of the individual mind (your own, or that of a song character) and also the diffuse cultural mind which we carry around with us, while travelling hopefully as regards what emerges from the mining?
And, relating to that, do you have an interest in neuroscience — how brains imagine an extended world — in parallel to the mind’s more supernatural-seeming, liminal perceptions? Or does that get in the way of the art? Perhaps there’s a degree of mystery (in the sense of ritual and symbol) which needs to be embraced and left undissected in order for the experience to remain significant.
(MW): Yes — very perceptive. That shift you’re noticing, away from trying to “make the magickal credible,” is a real one. What’s far more compelling to me now is this mining process; into the individual mind, yes, but also into the tangled skein of shared cultural residues we all carry. That diffuse cultural mind you mention; it’s the substrate for so many of the lyrical or aesthetic decisions I make, whether conscious of it or not.
Interestingly, while writing Hiss of Today, I came across a bit of research that really stayed with me — the “open-label placebo” effect. This idea states that even when a person knows they’re taking a placebo, the intervention can still yield measurable results simply because it is framed and delivered within a ritualised medical model context. Belief itself is not always the key mechanism at work.
The podcast Weird Studies (which I strongly recommend) talks about this beautifully in one of its episodes, and more eloquently than I will here; the notion that even if you don’t subscribe to the literal cosmology of a magickal system, by engaging in the ritual, you’re participating in a structured form of randomness. You’re loosening your grip on fixed patterns and letting a certain strangeness into your field of action.
So yes, I’m interested in how our brains construct an extended world, but I don’t necessarily want to dissect everything. Some things have to remain mysterious, or at least poetic, to do their work. Symbolism and ritual speak a language the rational mind can’t always parse, but the body and the unconscious can often understand.
And with that Michael drains the last of his virtual coffee, stands and shakes Dann’s hand, and then walks towards the door of the café next door to the Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, satisfied that he has reigned in Dann’s terrier-like inquisitiveness, for the time being, at least.
[Our thanks to Ashley Jones for the photographs us in this article]
You can read Dann Chinn’s review of Michael Woodman’s Hiss Of Today album HERE
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