“Unspool the tape and queue to join the order,” sings Michael Woodman, in soft hallowed tones over a bevelled glimmer of guitar. Then his voice changes, subtly but sharply.
“But you can’t have it as you had it then.”
It’s the first words of the first song. A warning, already? So soon…
If you’re not counting Psithurism (2021’s attenuated EP of darkly luminous art rock and psychedelic folk-horror) – or, indeed, his early one-man Thumpermonkey work before he’d recruited other like-minded souls – Hiss of Today is Michael Woodman’s debut solo album. After around ten Thumpermonkey releases (ranging from those knowingly/prismatically deranged early EPs to the dense, demanding full-band albums of heavy strangeness in recent years), it’s also his most accessible work to date. An odd thing to say about a record whose main tagline and selling point appears to be that it’s “equal parts nostalgic hauntology, tales of cursed ZX Spectrum tapes, and hallucinated 8-bit lore.”
In part, the usual Woodman preoccupations remain in place. Tantalising and thickening layers of occultism still imbue day-to-day life; emergent strands of weird fiction tropes span cyberpunk, Borges-ian philosophical fantasy, lost-world fiction and what one suspects are yellowing tracts of esoteric knowledge bound in suspiciously-sourced leather. The music, too, is heady and deep – a melding of intricate Gothic atmospheres, post-prog complexities, hanging post-rock vision-scapes and an occasional hint of brain-metal, albeit crafted to fit around Woodman’s current one-man-plus-loop-station live set-up. Peculiar angles of vocal line and occasional vertiginous shifts in pitch or viewpoint punctuate his songcraft, alongside a persistent strand of wry, subtle, genre-aware humour. To salt and refract the end product, an elusive flickering post-modern perspective deliberately garbles and blurs any clear, final storylines, leaving you with vivid impressions and puzzle-fragments to splice together. It’s been a demanding but strangely engaging recipe over the years; with Woodman’s particular knack being his ability to draw you in and include you with all of this, implying that you, too, will at some point either get the joke or uncover enough of the tale. His persistently luscious voice – part theatrical hierophant and part orchestral crooner, with an occasional flinty dash of baritone rock scream – is now, as ever, the cherry on the cake.
Yet there are some signs here of an unclenching; of a movement towards songs which, if never precisely clear-cut, are at least more spacious and penetrable than Thumpermonkey’s cliff-like concoctions of witty, arcane mystery. While Psithurism swapped Thumpermonkey’s Aztec mirrors, college libraries and research institutes for more immediate concerns around dark-dusk woodlands, decay, crime and cryptids, Hiss of Today draws (as mentioned) connections between home computer esoterica and the doggedly development Thelemic magic of Aleister Crowley, simultaneously plumbing and interlocking the tangled psychological depths of wannabe counterculture magicians and deep-delving 8-bit geeks. On a first glance, that reads as being pretty niche. On a second, more thoughtful glance – and once you’ve allowed the idea’s gelid foundations to seep a little wider – it begins to make broader sense.
In a contemporary tech-soaked world, populated by people who’ve increasingly grown up with the ceremony of computer tools, Hiss of Today’s games of symbols seem weirdly apposite. To get the first of the album’s singles for free, you prove your worth by playing an old-fashioned text adventure online. Once you have the actual album, you’ll find invocations of “communion punch cards” and of machines like strong-boxes crammed with “gravid history”. For 1980s kids in particular, it will hint at distant recollections of machine-code entertainment carried on and summoned up from cheap cassettes and traded covertly in school playgrounds like stolen lore. For more contemporary times, there’s a gamer-geek reference to full-motion video, and fleeting references to the mingled senses of frustration and privilege which surround online meetings. In the climactic song, there’s even a sonic repurposing of the splintering-scribble sound of a vintage ZX Spectrum loading screen, recast (and reacknowledged) as an echoing, priming ritual. Occasionally, there are suggestions that some of the song’s performances and landscapes are strain-dreams, sparking within the overworked, obsessive cortices of game-players, doomscrollers and research addicts. Overlaying the whole business is a filmy veil of distant memories and distorted recall, as well as bewitching elusive-but-insistent tunes.
After the swelling, purring, echoing V.I.T.R.I.O.L. (a cthonic ritual of uncovering disguised as an avant-rock overture), No Moon, No Throne emerges like an ominous string of submarine lights, Woodman’s echoing, terraced guitar underpinning a mysterious lyric of undersea call and immersive attention. Crucially, those hints of a Dagonic sea monster (or deep-swimming god) remain in the background, and what seems to interest Woodman more is the transformative effect of the voyage on the voyager. “Underwater so long, your head began to glow./ Slow stretch of the sky’s lens. Prayers as bubbles from below.” It seems more like a warning to the self than a “here-be-beasties” sign. Woodman chides his protagonist, reminding him and us that often there’s little more than “a hair between a zealot and a hoarder”. The suggestion that at least part of the supposed destination is empty suggests that something’s gone wrong with the journey, even within what the journey was originally supposed to be.
Suffused by fierce, aggressive imagery of magicians in battle (and of stubbornly slumbering homonculi who just won’t do what’s wanted of them), The Button slashes even deeper into this idea of ritual-gone-wrong. Dissonant alt-rock hooks and barbs – half-catchy, half-alienating – fill out an atmosphere of belligerent perversity and petty conflict. “Teach an anger management class to scorpions,” Woodman suggests archly; and as we peer through the song’s various levels (which include cameos from real-life Crowley associate Madam Blavatsky and from fictional Japanese fraud-psychic Madame Horos from Toaru no Majitsu), there’s a hint of desperation. At least, of observed desperation: the anger of the small-minded, desperately seeking cleansing and enlargement, and comparing revelation to a factory reset. Not for the first time, unexpected links are drawn between the arcane and niche consumerism. Rather than delivering a tract or screed, though, Woodman provides a streak of folded cut-up reportage, leaving it to you to draw the conclusions and to savour the convoluted drama.
Lapsed provides perhaps the sweetest tune on the record, and possibly the most cryptic. Woodman drops a little of the stern side-eye from his tone and allows himself to shift and melt into a more tender take on his semi-falsetto, while flakes of glimmering guitar chip and bounce around him in slow-motion. The hidden tale beneath, though, is hard to unearth. Perhaps it’s better that way. Even without digging too deeply, we get a filmic, dream-logic account in which sight-and-smell imagery from Hollywood cutting rooms, from the nineteenth century gold-rush and from psychological disintegration all overlap and rotate together, like scorched paper flakes rising up from a bonfire, never to be reassembled. Here too, there’s the suggestion of another ritual, another process, this time one in which the con is right there on the surface (“My accent turns my shtick to gold for you.”) and one in which you can somehow become lost within your own act of will.
All of this follows on from the drawn-out instrumental The Wandering Nerve, in which ululating Crimsonic guitars (sometimes strangely sweet, but more often stricken) stretch out across a bloody tapestry of background rumble, cave laughter and horror-pause. Having painted a wordless picture in which speech is lost and motion slows, it seamlessly diverts into a serene two-note trap enveloping pattering piano and goblin gargle. Pairing these two tracks feels like witnessing a creepy, meaning-laded cinematic kiss from the Old World to the New; as if F.W. Murnau had laid dry, strangely compromised lips onto the nape of Roman Polanski’s neck, and passed something on.
The New World break is brief, though, with Ignathox returning us to leather-bound old-school English occultry, as hints of Dennis Wheatley mingle with dream-borne fragments of ancient Greek- and Egyptian-tinted legend. In a record replete with summonings and connectings, it also features the only direct meeting with a monster: a horrifying eel-jawed cliff-dweller who’s as likely to gobble you up as talk to you. Ignathox itself, though, is only as dangerous as what you yourself bring to the encounter, one in which your deeper intent and attitude will determine the outcome. Within this grimoire chapter, Woodman’s guitar echoes in tight sparking notes: dry bones in a slate canyon, or a fragile psychic lifeline deep in the subconscious. Some people don’t emerge from their rituals. Bring your lucky dice, and a clear head.
Apparently Ignathox is also the name of the towering shrouded nightmare from the Lychgate video: the one who fights a guitar duel with Woodman’s mutton-chopped, cut-loose-from-space-and-time soldier-man (before it eats him and spews him into the wherever). Despite that, and despite being named after the corpse-door of old churchyards (and even though there’s a guesting Kavus Torabi on hand to add psychedelic twinkle and weight to the guitars), Lychgate itself comes across as the album’s jauntiest tune. Cute little drum machine rachets plus dewdrop piano provide extra framework for Woodman’s lilting, near-nursery rhyme delivery to dance and skip over. As regards the song, it seems to be about accepting death, or at the very least accepting some fundamental transition, laughing as you go and as you merge with the new substrate.
Here, Woodman has fun shuffling the divining cards for yet another flawed protagonist, looking him up and down and calling him out – “banjaxed and brined and born so old and small and furious./ Announce yourself like jet exploding from a photon sphere. I guess you got to laugh.” As the song brews towards an end section of bucketing, fanfaring guitars he shifts into a more sympathetic, first-person perspective (“I’ll stop constructing any memory. / There’s only me, still searching for my shoes. / I sit atop another misheard ideal. / No future past; just got the hiss of today,”) before delivering a nasty sting in the tail as the song winds down, suggesting that the ritual also demands a deliberate and dangerous stripping-away of empathy and regret, with awful consequences.
So, amongst all of this esoterica and hooded references, what makes Hiss of Today perhaps Woodman’s most accessible and timely record? Tunes aside (and they’re good ones – satisfying, full-terraced mind-haunters which you’ll hum in fragments), perhaps it’s the way that it draws personality more sharply into focus. You don’t get to know everything about the protagonists in these songs, but you get a feel of what drives them: their fierce needs, their pomposities and studied ambitions, their prepared recklessness. There’s a sense of remembered misapprehensions, of risks taken which may or may not have been successful; of memories partially cloaked off. Sometimes, there’s a sense of a lesson being taught, obliquely, through unconcluded stories in which paths are indicated, and parallels drawn. For me, also, it spawns a particular nagging parallel. As we travel though a time in which potential millions of angry, alienated people use the screens of their laptops and phones to scry out guidance and community – and all too often get sucked into toxic flows of power and influence which they don’t really understand – it’s easy to see the concept of the dogged computer geek and the avid, blinkered seekers of truth and control collectively merge into something terrifying: last year’s malcontent becoming this year’s active poisoner.
Is Woodman offering such an on-the-nose analogy? Possibly not: he might sometimes sing like a preacher, but he’s never been one, and Hiss of Today offers a chart of clues, filtered recallings and associations rather than a straightforward map. For what might remain to be said, Telomeres offers a closing and something of a closure. Backed by a grating rumble of glassy electric organ (rising like a cathedral front or an empty cliff-face), Woodman fuses the forms of text-adventure game and deeper, desperate, doomed quests for meaning into a single bewildering experience, observing it all with a distant sympathy (“You start the tape. You type the question. / Bewildered as it coughs up more poetry than you can hold./ Radiant from telomere to tail.”). Musing on humanity’s knowledge journey “from liturgy, to gnosis, to secular despair” and to a point where manipulable, unprepared individuals struggle towards a position in which they’re yet more vulnerable (“transparent; perpetually observed”), he seems to be pointing to some kind of solace in which our confused and painful selves – our battles with ourselves and with others and with evasive truths – all sublime into information, memories and lessons; perhaps to be lost, or perhaps to be carried onwards, less painfully, by others. “Just as everything you hear discards its physical impression, / we become mist.”
If you already know Michael Woodman’s work, this album’s just what you’d want it to be – profoundly clever, elusive and spellbinding, with enough muscle to balance its brains and the intelligence to know exactly when to apply that force. If you’re new to what he does, it’s a window onto a striking kaleidoscopic singer-songwriter’s perspective, in which nothing is more complex, scary, mythic and perversely beautiful than the human mind and the way it sits in the overlapping worlds of where it must exist and what it can make for itself. In all senses, Hiss of Today is a work of modern-day sorcery: an observation of knowledge pursued, and of what might wash back.
Anyway, you’ve had your recommendations; and, such as they are, your warnings. Obtain. Unspool. Proceed?
[Dann spoke at great length with Michael Woodman about his new album Hiss of Today, and much, much more besides… you can find the interview HERE]
TRACK LISTING
01. V.I.T.R.I.O.L. (1:23)
02. No Moon, No Throne (6:13)
03. The Button (4:50)
04. The Wandering Nerve (3:16)
05. Lapsed (3:56)
06. Ignathox (5:42)
07. Lychgate (4:08)
08. Telomeres (4:50)
Total Time – 34:22
MUSICIANS
Michael Woodman – Vocals, Instruments, Programming
John Simm – Drums (3,5 & 7)
Kavus Torabi – Additional Guitars (7)
ADDITIONAL INFO
Record Label: Believers Roast
Country of Origin: UK
Date of Release: 26th April 2025
LINKS
Michael Woodman – Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | YouTube | X | Instagram
