Today we are talking to Toren Atkinson, vocalist and lyricist for the Canadian Lovecraftian band The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets:

IFP: How did the group get started?

TA: Back in the halcyon days of grunge, circa 1992, Jordan Pratt (our current drummer) was playing for a group in Chilliwack called Mystery Machine. They were enjoying so much success they were signed to Nettwerk records (who handles Sarah McLachlan). We had gone to high school with these guys, so naturally, we figured if they could start a band, then by Byatis’ serpent beard, so could we! Lack of musical training or experience be damned!

IFP: Why Lovecraft?

TA: The Thickets’ webmaster, Joe Fulgham, introduced me to the HPL anthology, Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, and I was instantly hooked. The florid prose, the ambiance, the nihilist philosophy, and of course, the giant space monsters, spoke to me in a way that no other author had. Aside from my superhero artwork, I was doing a lot of Lovecraftian monster artwork and at the time, Warren C. Banks (our guitarist) and I were playing the roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu. So, when we decided to form a joke band, Cthulhu was a natural angle, albeit a non-euclidean one.

IFP: Aside from Lovecraft, are there other sources of inspiration in your music?

TA: Topically, there are many, and most of them have already been expressed on our albums in songs like “The Math Song”, “Power Up” (about superheroes), “Jimmy the Squid”, “Big Robot Dinosaur”, and “A Marine Biologist” (my fascination with the deep sea). The entire album, Spaceship Zero, was heavily inspired by the science fiction movies and reruns we’d all grown up with like Lost in Space and Angry Red Planet. One may anticipate that whatever our next album sounds like, it will be rife with dark, nerdy, science-heavy themes.

IFP: What are some recurring elements in your art?

TA: I’m known in the roleplaying game community for my Lovecraftian monster illustrations, but lately, I’ve been exploring both different art styles and subject matter as I delve into graphic storytelling, which is to say comic books, including funny cartoon animals and more gritty modern ’slice of life’ stuff.

IFP: How do you go about creating a song or album? Do you have a timetable or do you just wait for inspiration to strike?

TA: As a collection of lazy procrastinators, we will usually “throw our hat over the fence” by booking time at a recording studio. Then we have x months/weeks to come up with an album. This may not be the best way to create art, but it seems to get us by so far. Quite often, we will just jam a song out and if it sticks to the rock wall, it’s done. If not, we rework until we’re sick to death of it and if, by that time, it’s still not working, it goes into the Pit of Failure, never to be heard again. Our last album, The Shadow Out of Tim, was a more unusual process since I decided it would be an adaptation of a single Lovecraft novella, so we didn’t just write the album song by song, but really had to come up with a strategy of how to string everything together.

IFP: How do you think your music fits into the Lovecraft/Mythos scene?

TA: Fifteen years ago, I would have said “awkwardly”. When we first started out, there seemed to be much less of a sense of humour and irony in Lovecraftiana. These days, however, there’s Cthulhu plush dolls, Lovecraft-inspired web comics, and so forth, so I think The Thickets is no longer quite ‘The Shadow Out of Place” with our devil-may-care attitude to twisting the Mythos into places that Lovecraft himself would never endorse.

IFP: What do you want fans of Lovecraft to get out of your stuff?

TA: I have found a lot of so-called Lovecraft-inspired music tends to be in name only. By which I mean a song may be called “The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young” but, if the song actually has lyrics, they will either make no mention of Shub Niggurath or they will only be “Shub Niggurath!” screamed over and over again. One thing I’m proud of with The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets is that, while we don’t necessarily take a Lovecraft poem or story and directly put it to music, a song like “The Sounds of Tindalos” or “The Innsmouth Look” is going to be steeped in Lovecraftian lore. We make direct references, but we also make the Cthulhu Mythos our own by putting it in a more punk-rock milieu (”The Chosen One” or “Please God No”) and a distinctly new, and often tongue-in-cheek, place (”Shoggoths Away”). I feel that is our duty, since the very band name is a direct quote from a Lovecraft story.

IFP: You seem to have a generally light-hearted attitude toward Lovecraft and your music in general. What do you think makes your music fun?

TA: Personally, I like to challenge myself when writing music. I love playing with language and it’s that sort of nerdy obsession that makes me do things like put a glossary in the liner notes of The Shadow Out of Tim. I really believe in opening my creativity to the fans in a community sort of way, which is to say that I don’t mind taking ideas or contributions from our fanbase, which is generally quite an intelligent and savvy bunch. For example, I knew I wanted to do a song entirely in ancient Egyptian, but not knowing Middle Egyptian myself, I did a lot of research to find some fans who could help, and with their valuable input, we wrote “Nyarlathotep”. Same deal with our song in German (”Dies ist Unverschamtheit”) and the algebraic equation which comprises “The Math Song” – if I had tried to work these things out by myself, they wouldn’t nearly be as accurate or interesting. Knowing that so many like-minded individuals out there appreciate and support the crazy nonsense produced by myself and The Thickets helps to keep the art alive and up to a relatively high standard.

IFP: What bands do you like?

TA: My all-time favourites are probably Nomeansno, Ween, The Police, Butthole Surfers, Masters of Reality & Queens of the Stone Age. Others include The Ink Spots, Black Sabbath, Raymond Scott, Louis Prima & Men At Work.

IFP: What are you working on right now?

TA: Apart from very gradually working on a new Thickets album, I’m part of Second Level Wizards Awesome Event Society, which was founded shortly after the first Cthulhupalooza here in Vancouver. We’re putting together a Saturday Morning Cartoon Party and a screening of the BLAST! documentary about launching a “sophisticated scanning device that detects submillimeter light from distance star-forming dust clouds while suspended beneath a NASA high-altitude balloon at the top of the atmosphere” at the Rio Theatre here in Vancouver in September. We’re also organizing “Son of Cthulhupalooza” in December and we’re looking for films both long and short to screen to the audience before the performance by The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. Visit secondlevelwizards.com and search for us on Facebook.

Additionally, the deadline for music video submissions for The Most Eldritch Music Video Contest on Earth has been extended to Dec. 31 2009 so any filmmakers watching this should definitely consider creating a music video to appear on our DVD release sometime in the not-too-distant future. Go here for details on that.

PLUS: If anyone knows any marine biologists who would like to be in a music video extolling the virtues of science, we’re still collecting footage of scientists doing work or waving to the camera for our video to “A Marine Biologist”. I’m also working on several comic book projects, including the World Wildlife Federation of Justice, which is about superheroes in a world of anthropomorphic animals, and also a hilarious spoof of the Superfriends & Gleek with Mark Shainblum, who created the Quebec superheroine Fleur-de-Lys, who you may have seen on a Canadian postage stamp not too long ago.

IFP: What is your dream project?

TA: Creating a comic or roleplaying game that becomes a film or cartoon series would be fantastic. Also, as a voice actor, being a regular character voice on a cool superhero cartoon is a dream I’ve had since I was a kid. You can actually see my chops in this genre by youtubing “Captain Paycheck pilot”.

IFP: What is your favourite Lovecraft/Mythos story?

TA: “The Rats in the Walls” popped my Lovecraft cherry, so it will always have a special place in my heart, but I also love the longer, more in-depth tales like “The Shadow Out of Time” and “At the Mountains of Madness”.

IFP: If you could be a Lovecraft character or creature, who would you be and why?

TA: I would be Yog-Sothoth, so that I could be coterminous with time and space. Yeah! Coterminous! The key and the gate whereby the spheres meet! Past, present, future, all are one in ME!!!

The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets was formed in 1992 and has produced numerous tongue-in-cheek albums based on Lovecraft’s work, including The Shadow Out of Tim and Let Sleeping Gods Lie. Its members are: Toren Atkinson (Vocals), Merrick Atkinson (Bass ‘n’ Back Vocals), Warren C. Banks (Guitar), Mario Nieva (Guitar), and Jordan Pratt (Drums).

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