Journal of Musicological Research

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Unholy Progeny: Psychic TV and Witch House at

the Crossroads of Occultism in the Information
Age

Daniel Siepmann

To cite this article: Daniel Siepmann (2018) Unholy Progeny: Psychic TV and Witch House at the
Crossroads of Occultism in the Information Age, Journal of Musicological Research, 37:1, 81-104,
DOI: 10.1080/01411896.2018.1413870

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01411896.2018.1413870

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JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGICAL RESEARCH
2018, VOL. 37, NO. 1, 81–104
https://doi.org/10.1080/01411896.2018.1413870

Unholy Progeny: Psychic TV and Witch House at the

Crossroads of Occultism in the Information Age
Daniel Siepmann
Woodside, NY

ABSTRACT
This article bridges two underground music networks that
relied on inventive communications tactics to both obscure
their movement and reach new followers: Genesis P-Orridge’s
chaos magick sect Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, with its
artistic mouthpiece Psychic TV (c. 1981–1991), and the
Internet-based electronic music micro-genre witch house (c.
2008–2013). Though outwardly synergetic in their aesthetic
and operational commitments, a focus on the underlying
occult agenda of each reveals an exploitative situation—
witch house assumes the mantle of the Psychic TV/TOPY pro-
ject, while concurrently undermining the ritual-driven “cultural
engineering” that predicated its existence.

The band Throbbing Gristle (1975–1981) is well-established in the lore of

late twentieth-century popular music as not only pioneering the industrial
music genre but also advancing new sound synthesis methods, protest song
practices, and tactics in rock’s dalliance with multimedia and performance
art—all while fronted by iconoclast and public intellectual Genesis Breyer
P-Orridge (born Neil Andrew Megson). Throbbing Gristle inspired legions
of imitators, emulators, and stylistic descendants, attaining narrative central-
ity within ensuing major strains of subversive rock and electronic music. Yet
P-Orridge’s own subsequent music project, Psychic TV, is critically regarded
as a mere gloss or afterthought to Throbbing Gristle, despite persisting (with
some interruptions) for the better part of three and a half decades. Among
journalists, listeners, and fellow artists, Psychic TV’s catalog is comparatively
underexamined and arguably underappreciated.
One of P-Orridge’s personal inventions bears responsibility for Psychic
TV’s footnote status: not some songwriting style or sonic treatment, but
rather a ten-year scheme of cultural engineering that fused music and
media art with several streams of occultism, including techniques now
associated with chaos magick.1 In practice, Psychic TV was less a band

1
This archaic spelling of “magick” was reintroduced in modern discourse by Aleister Crowley to distinguish “the
Science of the Magi from all its counterfeits,” and is used here in that tradition to differentiate occult practice
from stagecraft. See Aleister Crowley, Magick: Liber Aba, Book 4 (York Beach, ME: Weiser Books, 2004), 47.
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
82 D. SIEPMANN

than the artistic mouthpiece of P-Orridge’s quasi-spiritual organization,

which s/he led from 1981–1991, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY).2
Founded simultaneously with its musical appendage, TOPY served as a
global confederation of magick practitioners while also functioning symbio-
tically as the Psychic TV fan club. TOPY synthesized disparate strands of
Western esotericism into an idiosyncratic belief system, one developed by
P-Orridge as the culmination of h/er travels, research, and experience as a
performance artist and bandleader. Psychic TV’s critical disparity, then, may
be a consequence of operating under a completely different rubric than its
predecessor—the trendsetting shock and awe of Throbbing Gristle gave way
to a hybrid venture that instead used the music industry’s dominant para-
digm of fandom and artist adulation for its own ends.3
The Psychic TV and TOPY framework represented a stark departure
from traditional scene configurations, and for several decades existed
absent any comparable entity; no other music community exhibited
homologous traits. Only in the end of the first decade of the 21st
century, with the maturation of the Internet as a music creation and
sharing tool of seemingly limitless potential, did a collective emerge as a
would-be inheritor of Psychic TV and TOPY’s heterodox approach.
Christened with the genre label “witch house,” this collaborative net-
work was comprised of largely anonymous Internet users who generated
and disseminated polystylistic electronic music with a brooding affect,
alongside imagery and text saturated in the semiotics of the occult.
Connecting the two is a meaningful task for musicology, as their
through-line spans pre- and post-Internet eras in which music and art
subcultures required inventive tactics to both obscure their movement
and reach new followers. Historicizing their maneuvers sheds light on
the cultural subtexts that each negotiated and limns ways that future
music communities might harness yet-undreamt communications
technologies.
This article advances a larger historiographic agenda as well. To date, most
explications about the people, ideas, and music in the Psychic TV/TOPY
constellation treat both the TOPY belief system and its praxis as a collection

2
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge self-identifies as pandrogyne, and employs the pronouns “s/he,” “h/er,” and “h/erself.”
The name “Breyer” and these pronoun choices derive from a body modification initiative known as the
Pandrogyne Project. Inspired by the cut-up method of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs, Genesis and h/er
partner Lady Jaye (born Jacqueline Breyer) underwent numerous surgeries to resemble one another, manifesting
a single, unified being with a “Third Mind” known as Breyer P-Orridge. The Pandrogyne Project is explored in the
documentary The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (2011), released after Lady Jaye died in 2007. This is further
outlined in Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, “Breaking Sex,” in Thee Psychick Bible: Thee
Apocryphal Scriptures ov Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Thee Third Mind ov Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, edited by
Jason Louv (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2010), 443–45.
3
For more on Throbbing Gristle, see Drew Daniel, 33 1/3: Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (London: Bloomsbury Publishing,
2008); Simon Ford, Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of Coum Transmissions & Throbbing Gristle (London: Black
Dog Publishing, 1999); S. Alexander Reed, Assimilate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Cosey Fanni
Tutti, Art Sex Music (London: Faber & Faber Social, 2017).
 UNHOLY PROGENY: PSYCHIC TV AND WITCH HOUSE 83

of sensational oddities.4 Indeed, tales of debauchery and profligate behavior

dominate what paltry discussion TOPY has accumulated among both music
scholars and popular culture writers. I contend that when this is the case, the
description of TOPY’s lived experience serves as a mythologizing force,
rather than an explanatory one.5 The forthcoming analysis runs against this
grain, instead adopting TOPY’s convictions and systems as part of a self-
sufficient occult epistemology that possesses the same interpretative power as
other philosophies or critical theories in the humanities toolkit. I hope that
by working through the structural and technical implications of chaos
magick as a legitimate part of a hermeneutic project, its utility is demon-
strated for future academic work on artists and music communities that
employ an occult worldview in their creative practice—ranging from black
metal and neo-folk, to industrial culture, witch house, and beyond.
When placed in relief, witch house exhibits an outward synergy with
Psychic TV/TOPY. Chaos magickal techniques are strategically integrated
throughout both Psychic TV/TOPY and witch house’s aural, visual, and
textual presentation, serving as distinct markers of how participants in each
mediate their internal community and define separateness from non-
practitioners. Furthermore, whereas Psychic TV/TOPY’s secretive enclave
coalesced around a patchwork web of analog exchange methods of commu-
nication—faxes, post office boxes, books, pamphlets, and safe houses—witch
house appropriated the twenty-first-century equivalent of these strategies,
extending its tendrils throughout social media and music platforms on the
literal Web of the end of the first decade of that century. Yet witch house’s
underlying occult agenda proves antithetical to its progenitor’s ethical, poli-
tical, and social program; rather than facilitate TOPY’s objective of move-
ment-building through a critical mass of individual and collective ritual, their
nihilistic endgame merely teased, and ultimately disrupted, participants’
reception and processing of implied magickal content. Witch house sabo-
tages its forerunner’s cultural engineering project by adopting its mantle,
employing only the trappings of the occult while turning their own chaos
magick tactics against them. Psychic TV/TOPY and witch house’s fraught

4
As examples, see Emily Gosling, “How Genesis P-Orridge Changed the Course of Electronic Music Culture Forever,”
Vice, https://thump.vice.com/en_uk/article/ypjgpy/the-cult-of-genesis-p-orridge (accessed November 17, 2017);
Steve Huey, “Psychic TV,” AllMusic, http://www.allmusic.com/artist/psychic-tv-mn0000375945/biography/
(accessed March 20, 2016); David Keenan, England’s Hidden Reverse (London: Strange Attractor Press, 2016);
Charles Neal, “Psychic TV,” in his Tape Delay: Confessions from the Eighties Underground (London: SAF Publishing,
2001), 227–37; Christopher Partridge, “Esoterrorism and the Wrecking of Civilization: Genesis P-Orridge and the
Rise of Industrial Paganism,” in Pop Pagans: Paganism and Popular Music, edited by Donna Weston and Andy
Bennett (Abingdon, UK: Routledge Publishing, 2014), 189–212; Christopher Partridge, The Lyre of Orpheus: Popular
Music, the Sacred, and the Profane (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 167–68; and Nadja Sayej, “genesis
p-orridge on thee temple ov psychick youth,” Vice, https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/j58yg4/genesis-p-orridge-on
-thee-temple-ov-psychick-youth (accessed November 17, 2017).
5
Since most Psychic TV/TOPY mythology actively serves the original intent of the cultural engineering project, this
is a necessary distinction. By not heeding such cautions, historical examinations to date risk carrying water for
their subject unwittingly.
84 D. SIEPMANN

dynamic is explicated in three ways: first, by demonstrating the apparent

similitude of their aesthetic commitments and operational models; second,
by articulating stark divergences in their magickal ideology and practice; and
third, by describing the consequences of this double bind—an artistic/logis-
tical convergence on one hand, and a spiritual rift on the other. Key to this
entire story, however, is chaos magick itself, an influential and evolving
structure for occult practice that now spans four decades.

Chaos magick
Chaos magick emerged in the mid-1970s as one of the first postmodern
manifestations of occultism. Its core precept is that the magician (or
“operator”) is not bound to a specific occult school or tradition but is
instead urged to select ritual and spell methods from a variety of different,
often divergent or contradictory practices in order to achieve a particular
objective.6 By refusing to commit adherents to a single, systematized con-
vention, chaos magick is a strident repudiation of prior Western occult
teachings, the majority of which demand fidelity to a particular set of all-
encompassing beliefs and techniques.7 The societies of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries—the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,
the Astrum Argentum, or the Ordo Templi Orientis—are chaos magick’s
foil. They embody a Victorian version of medieval occultism popularized in
the fin de siècle imagination: thick tomes of incantations to be memorized,
extensive membership hierarchies with new bits of hidden knowledge
gleaned at each rung, and elaborate, secretive rituals kept far away from
prying eyes.8
Chaos magick’s radical opportunism not only disarms these cloistered and
ornate traditions but treats belief itself—conventionally inviolable—as a
manipulable tool of enchantment, bending worldly affairs towards the opera-
tor’s intentions and aims. This carries an important subtext: that the efficacy
of magick is merely one such belief, whose practicality is only temporarily
relevant insofar as the magician’s objectives are served.9 Through this lens,
chaos magick is a heuristic behavioral program or psychological tactic that
each magician designs and undertakes alone, not a literal statement about or
an expression of specific metaphysical commitments.10 Its original
6
For a more detailed examination of the general chaos magick schema, see Phil Hine, Condensed Chaos (Tempe, AZ:
New Falcon Publications, 1995), 13–15.
7
Hine, Condensed Chaos, 19.
8
Phil Hine, Oven-Ready Chaos (London: Chaos International Publications, 1997), 7. See also Jason Louv,
“Introduction—On the Way to Thee Garden,” Thee Psychick Bible, 18.
9
“It is not necessary to believe in order to perform magick. In fact, belief is a barrier to success second only to the
overpowering desire to succeed. Both these stumbling blocks are, in a sense, identical as they both symptomize
the ‘lust of results.’” TOPY, “About Belief,” Thee Psychick Bible, 218.
10
While chaos magick originated in the 1970s, echoes of similar ideas can be found in earlier occult authors: “In this
book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many
 UNHOLY PROGENY: PSYCHIC TV AND WITCH HOUSE 85

formulation is attributed to Peter Carroll and Ray Sherwin, particularly in

their published works from 1978 (Liber Null & Psychonaut and The Book of
Results respectively) whose influence derives largely from the writings of
Aleister Crowley’s sporadic disciple, the author and visual artist Austin
Osman Spare (1886–1956).11 Early adherents also sought inspiration from
the 1960s cult Process Church of the Final Judgment, novelist and playwright
Robert Anton Wilson, and the Discordian Society, a tongue-in-cheek religion
that revered the Greek goddess of chaos, Eris, while adopting a deliberately
irreverent and satirical perspective toward matters both metaphysical and
mundane.12 Chaos magick’s potential building blocks are vast; even H. P.
Lovecraft’s fictional Cthulhu Mythos provides grist for operators to employ
when crafting and programming “useful beliefs.”13 Acolytes also borrowed
liberally from disparate disciplines in which chaotic behavior began being
observed in the late 1970s: physics, biology, economics, statistics, and applied
mathematics.14
This plethora of source material manifests primarily through two broad
yet interrelated techniques widely adopted by chaos magick practitioners:
sigilization and gnosis, cornerstones of both Spare and Carroll’s thought.
Sigilization is a ritual act that uses a symbolic locus to encode or disguise
conscious awareness of intent in order to maximize the possibility that said
intent actualizes in the real world. The process begins with the magician
selecting an objective—either a change they desire in their own behaviors and
tendencies, or a shift in circumstances to realize externally. They then create,
or re-appropriate, an abstract symbol or representational object, which,
through the act of personal design, becomes an abstruse effigy of the opera-
tor’s desire. This sigil is frequently, though not necessarily, a glyph, a simple-
yet-ambiguous drawing, or a vague doodle; Spare himself utilized jumbled
text fragments in his sigils, while P-Orridge preferred recorded audio/visual
media in h/ers. Yet, the single function of a newborn sigil is one of purpose-
ful contradiction: to obfuscate, while still subliminally echoing, the very
intent that the operator previously strove to clarify and hone.

other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things
certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philoso-
phical validity to any of them. The advantages to be gained from them are chiefly these: a widening of the
horizon of the mind, and an improvement of the control of the mind.” Crowley, Magick: Liber Aba, Book 4, 613.
11
Hine, Condensed Chaos, 15. “ … Liber Null concentrated on techniques, saying that the actual methods of magic
are basically shared by the different systems, despite the differing symbols, beliefs and dogmas. What symbol
systems you wish to employ is a matter of choice, and … the webs of belief which surround them are means to
an end, rather than ends in themselves … .” Hine, Condensed Chaos, 17. See also Peter Carroll, Liber Null &
Psychonaut: An Introduction to Chaos Magic (San Francisco: Weiser Books, 1987); Ray Sherwin, The Book of Results
(Raleigh, NC: Lulu Press, 2006); and Austin Osman Spare, The Book of Pleasure: The Psychology of Ecstasy (Thame,
UK: I–H–O Books, 2005).
12
Hine, Condensed Chaos, 17. See also Adam Parfrey and Timothy Wyllie, eds., Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story
of the Process Church of the Final Judgement (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 1999).
13
For example, see Phil Hine, The Pseudonomicon (Tempe, AZ: The Original Falcon Press, 2009).
14
Hine, Condensed Chaos, 15, 17–19.
86 D. SIEPMANN

The sigil, once created, remains dormant until it is “charged.” This is

achieved through the act of gnosis, described as “willed entry into intense
altered states of consciousness … [comprising] physically ‘passive’ techni-
ques such as meditation, yoga, scrying, contemplation and sensory depriva-
tion … [or excitatory modes] includ[ing] chanting, drumming, dance,
emotional and sexual arousal.”15 Indeed, the mission of the ritual is the
magician’s entry into gnosis, fixating upon the sigil while deliberating
forgetting or ignoring the original objective. Once disoriented at the climax
of the gnostic process, the sigil is imbued with the psychic potency and
representational power of the magician’s ambition. Upon the completion of
gnosis—either through peak agitation or a nadir of deprivation—the opera-
tor must continue to forcefully ignore the original intent and, in some
cases, discard or destroy the sigil, an act known as “charge and forget.” The
original longing for change must be made unrecoverable. By snuffing out
all awareness of the desire, it is now forced to exist somewhere beyond
one’s immediate comprehension: either within the operator’s subconscious,
or cast out to be effectuated by some occult means unfolding beyond our
ken. The specifics of how the sigil manifests, in true chaos magickal
fashion, are irrelevant. The ritual provides a space for introspective inves-
tigation: the operator searches through a jumble of passions, chooses and
hones one through intense reflection, and then masks it with an abstract
symbol of idiosyncratic design, before deliberately annihilating both.16 The
chaos magician creates an allegorical structure that maximizes effectiveness
by embracing subjectivity, entrusting their most private desires to agencies
beyond comprehension; the more personal the pathway of sigilization and
gnosis for the user, the more powerful the ritual.17 Sigilization and gnosis
also form the bedrock of occult practice within Thee Temple ov Psychick
Youth, a preeminent example of an entire sect embracing chaos magickal
techniques.18 A discussion of P-Orridge’s Psychic TV and TOPY will
contextualize and deepen an understanding of the chaos magick ethos,
while detailing the truly remarkable elements of this sui generis artist net-
work and occult community.

15
Hine, Oven-Ready Chaos, 16.
16
Hine, Oven-Ready Chaos, 31–34. Hine’s original outline for sigilization, with much irreverence, “us[es] the acronym
S.P.L.I.F.F.: S – Specify Intent; P – Pathways available?; L – Link intent to symbolic carrier; I – Intense Gnosis/
Indifferent Vacuity; F – Fire; F – Forget.” Hine, Oven-Ready Chaos, 31. The term “gnosis” in chaos magick,
borrowed from gnostic Christianity and Neo-Platonism, refers to “knowledge of the heart—that which can only
come from personal insight and experience … [and which] is difficult to communicate to another, other than in
an oblique form.” Hine, Oven-Ready Chaos, 48.
17
“The Sigil must await its opportunity to act, influencing and evaluating the patterns of physicality until such time
as its encoded intention can be brought to fruition. It is a seed planted into the uncertainty of future time. It
awaits only the conditions of its germination.” Paul Cecil, “Even Further: The Metaphysics of Sigils,” Thee Psychick
Bible, 400–401.
18
See Carl Abrahamsson, “Foreword: The Deconstruction Of A Map Of An Unknown Territory,” Thee Psychick Bible,
12–13; and Kali Four Zero, “Sigils: For Kali and Eden,” Thee Psychick Bible, 85–94.
 UNHOLY PROGENY: PSYCHIC TV AND WITCH HOUSE 87

Psychic TV and Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth

Psychic TV’s popular music contributions are myriad: re-contextualization of
nostalgic tropes from psychedelic rock and folk ballads; further development
of sonic collages in songwriting; and advocacy of the cut-up method (taken
beyond initial explorations in Throbbing Gristle’s work), to name a few.19
But from P-Orridge’s vantage, the Psychic TV music project is “just sound-
tracks, functional [composition],” inextricably yoked to h/er larger enter-
prise, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth.20 Indeed, Psychic TV was the artistic
wellspring of the TOPY endeavor, one whose sonic and lyrical content
reflected TOPY’s synthesis of a praxis-based occult ideology, a decidedly
“philosophical occult movement; a church without orthodoxy or dogma.”21
Both Psychic TV and TOPY were fabricated in service to P-Orridge’s grand
aspiration from the ashes of Throbbing Gristle: “to use popular culture as the
alchemical jar to see what happens.”22
Psychic TV was first assembled in 1981 by P-Orridge alongside Alex
Fergusson, former guitar player of the punk band Alternative TV. Through
its perpetually rotating cast of musicians, Psychic TV became a musical
collective, with P-Orridge occupying the recurring role of lyricist, vocalist,
and artistic leader. Other conspicuous members across the group’s history
include many who went on to pursue—or had already spearheaded—
acclaimed musical projects in their own right: Dave Ball and Marc Almond
(Soft Cell), Geoff Rushton/John Balance (Coil), Peter “Sleazy”
Christopherson (Throbbing Gristle, Coil), David Tibet (Current 93),
Richard Schiessl, Daniel Ash (Bauhaus, Tones on Tail, Love and Rockets),
Z’EV, Fred Giannelli, Richard Norris (The Grid), Monte Cazazza, and
Douglas Rushkoff (futurist and cyberpunk theorist), among others. Psychic
TV achieved notable successes that coincided with TOPY’s growing infamy:
the 1984 single “Godstar,” an anthemic psych-pop hit that reached 67 on the

19
Daniel, Twenty Jazz Funk Greats, 58–65. Through interviews with Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson and P-Orridge
h/erself, Daniel verifies Throbbing Gristle’s Twenty Jazz Funk Greats as the first release to feature P-Orridge’s
obsession with occult technique. For instance, P-Orridge claims that the lyric “spell of semen” on the track “Still
Walking” explicitly foreshadows TOPY’s sigil practices. For further descriptions of Psychic TV and its musical
contributions, see Huey, “Psychic TV”; Keenan, England’s Hidden Reverse; Neal, “Psychic TV,” 227–37; Partridge,
“Esoterrorism and the Wrecking of Civilization,” 189–212; Partridge, The Lyre of Orpheus, 167–68; P-Orridge,
Thee Psychick Bible; and Reed, Assimilate, 141–44.
20
P-Orridge, “Letter to Jean-Pierre Turmel,” Thee Psychick Bible, 30.
21
P-Orridge, “Letter to Jean-Pierre Turmel,” 31. As Colin Duggan notes, “The performance art aspect of TOPY
expressed itself in many ways, most notably through the band Psychic TV, and their interaction with the art scene
throughout the 1980s is just one reason why it [TOPY] deserves to be treated as a parallel development rather
than subsumed into a general discussion on chaos magick.” Colin Duggan, “Perennialism and Iconoclasm: Chaos
Magick and the Legitimacy of Innovation,” in Contemporary Esotericism, edited by Egil Asprem and Kennet
Granholm (Bristol, CT: Equinox Publishing Limited, 2013), 95–96. Christopher Partridge characterizes Psychic TV
and TOPY as prime examples of “occulture”: any subculture that adopts occult themes as part of its oppositional
stance to dominant or mainstream behaviors or attitudes. Christopher Partridge, “Occulture is Ordinary,”
Contemporary Esotericism, 113–33. See also Abrahamsson, “Foreword,” Thee Psychick Bible, 11–15; and Louv,
“Introduction,” Thee Psychick Bible, 17–27.
22
Jay Kinney, “Music, Magic & Media Mischief: The Gnosis Interview with Genesis P-Orridge,” Thee Psychick Bible,
327.
88 D. SIEPMANN

UK charts, P-Orridge’s first and only flirtation with mainstream radio visi-
bility; the monthly release of 17 (of a promised 26) live albums beginning in
1986, earning a coveted slot in the Guinness Book of World Records for most
records released in a single year; and the 1988–91 dissemination of fake acid
house “compilation” albums, featuring rosters of pseudonymous artists
invented to deceptively suggest that Psychic TV was the wellspring of a
vibrant and growing UK acid house scene.23 This is the traditional Psychic
TV highlight reel, but one that erroneously relegates TOPY, a co-extensive
organism, to footnote status alone.
The two entities were conceived simultaneously, spurred by a series of
exploratory conversations between P-Orridge and fellow performance/mail
art provocateur Monte Cazazza. P-Orridge relates,

I told him I was thinking … of a paramilitary occult order that was secreted within
something that seemed enough a part of popular culture for it not to appear to be a
threat immediately … we considered what might happen if a rock band, instead of
just seeing fans as an income flow and an ego booster, focused that admiration and
energy towards a cultural and lifestyle-directing network … [an] organization that
shared demystified magickal techniques.24

If Psychic TV was truly conceived as the functional soundtrack to

P-Orridge’s emergent cultural engineering project, then it was certainly
effective: by the Temple’s zenith in the late 1980s and early 1990s, ten
thousand individuals worldwide claimed affiliation with TOPY, enough to
warrant an administrative hierarchy with larger “Stations” across the globe
(TOPY-CHAOS in Australia, TOPYNA in North America, TOPYSCAN in
Scandinavia, and TOPY EUROPE) and a wider smattering of small “Access
Points” where TOPY members would live communally and distribute litera-
ture and media related to the Temple.25
The TOPY framework, configured by P-Orridge h/erself, borrows princi-
pally from three separate strands: the Process Church of the Final Judgement,
providing “best practices” in cult spectacle and styling; the sigil procedures
23
Louv, “Introduction,” Thee Psychick Bible, 22–23. These fictitious acid house compilation albums are Jack the Tab
—Acid Tablets Volume One (1988), Tekno Acid Beat (1988), and Ultrahouse: The L.A. Connection (1991). Most music
journalism and scholarly work about Psychic TV falsely claim that they and P-Orridge pioneered British acid
house; these compilation albums (and corresponding tactics) are probably the most enduring legacy of Psychic
TV/TOPY’s cultural engineering project.
24
Kinney, “Music, Magic & Media Mischief,” Thee Psychick Bible, 327. See also P-Orridge, “Thee Process Is Thee
Produkt,” Thee Psychick Bible, 405–406.
25
“Thee TOPY network spans thee Western Hemisphere … and thee growth ov thee network, thee continual
development of new access points in thee UK, Europe, and America is proof that we are winning. Lines ov
communication grow stronger daily as we share with each other thee experiences we have gained, thee lessons
we have learnt, thee l-o-v-e and anger we feel. So it is with thee Sigil.” Kali Four Zero, “Sigils: For Kali and Eden,”
Thee Psychick Bible, 85–86. It is noteworthy that these Stations and Access Points enshrined a hierarchy of power
in TOPY, the same sort of privileging structure that they and other chaos magick sects outwardly professed to
reject. See also P-Orridge, “Thee Process Is Thee Produkt,” Thee Psychick Bible, 408–409, 414. One internal missive
framed TOPY as “[a] complex and expanding information/research network … [one whose] ideas, aims, and
practices are in a constant state ov flux.” Brother Malik, “Short-Circuit Control,” Thee Psychick Bible, 129. See also
Abrahamsson, “Foreword,” Thee Psychick Bible, 11–15.
 UNHOLY PROGENY: PSYCHIC TV AND WITCH HOUSE 89

and artistic emphases of Austin Osman Spare, who contributed heavily to

TOPY’s ideological and technical foundation; and the mail networks of the
1960s and 1970s that P-Orridge h/erself helped inscribe, whose Fluxus-
derived collage postcards sent via the UK Royal Post formed the operational
underpinning for how the TOPY organization would function on a daily
basis.26 Inspiration from all three comprise TOPY’s unifying ritual for its
aspirants and members: the creation and mailing of personal sigils from
across the globe to TOPY’s headquarters—aggregating the unconscious will
of the Temple’s followers en masse—and sparking both individual and
worldly change through a critical confluence of focused intent.27
Sanctioned membership as a “full Initiate” in TOPY required an individual
to fashion and send a total of 23 such sigils, with each having been “charged”
on the 23rd day of the month at the 23rd hour, Greenwich Mean Time.28
Resembling magickal rituals from other traditions, “Thee Sigil Ov Thee
Liquids” was meant to be performed naked, in a room illuminated only
with candle light. After the operator selects and concentrates on an object
of desire, their rudimentary sigil is written down on a piece of paper as an
abstract marking or text fragment. For TOPY, orgasm is the most esteemed
method of gnosis, installing the operator’s stated intent into their subcon-
scious while fixating on the sigil.29 After the gnostic climax, the sigil paper is
then anointed with the operator’s spit, blood, and sexual secretion, as well as
two locks of hair: one from the head, and one of pubic hair.30 After the paper
scrap dries, the operator mails it on the following day to the Temple’s
headquarters in Brighton, UK, to be stored in a locked vault; “all applicants
26
P-Orridge, “Thee Process Is Thee Produkt,” Thee Psychick Bible, 404–407. “From The Process [Church] we saw the
need for a logo, a symbol. I [P-Orridge] designed the Psychick Cross … a symbol that seems really familiar, that is
almost the same as lots of things but not quite the same, so that people could find it easy to adopt into their
personal mythology.” P-Orridge, “Thee Process Is Thee Produkt,” 406; and Kinney, “Music, Magic & Media
Mischief,” Thee Psychick Bible, 327. See also Beth Citron, “Twin Peaks: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and the
Himalayas,” Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Try to Altar Everything (New York: The Rubin Museum of Art, 2016), 9.
Drew Daniel also links TOPY’s sigil operation to P-Orridge’s prior involvement in mail art networks. Daniel, Twenty
Jazz Funk Greats, 60.
27
“What we suggest next is not instruction. It is a method—a method which can be used by anyone, alone or with
friends, regardless of any material or social circumstances, a method to be used by the Individual to break
through to their deeper consciousness, where fantasies, ambitions, and real wishes reside, the place where all
dreams meet. People can most readily identify and relate to dreams that are sexual, and that is the primary
reason for our choice of sex as a vehicle for this method to begin with. Our interest is therefore practical.” Genesis
P-Orridge, “Part I—Thee Grey Book,” Thee Psychick Bible, 41. P-Orridge’s engagement with these specific aspects
of Spare’s mysticism did not arise ex nihilo; two initial members of Psychic TV (circa 1981–1983) are credited by
historians. Christopher Partridge insists that David Tibet (David Michael Bunting)—later known for founding the
band Current 93—introduced P-Orridge to sigilization, whereas David Keenan attributes Spare’s introduction to
TOPY via John Balance (Geoff Rushton), who subsequently launched the band Coil. Partridge, “Esoterrorism,” 196;
Keenan, England’s Hidden Reverse, 139.
28
P-Orridge, “Part I—Thee Grey Book,” Thee Psychick Bible, 46. See also Abrahamsson, “Foreword,” Thee Psychick
Bible, 12–13.
29
“What will be the occult impact of several hundred, later several thousand Individuals masturbating to a common
desire and purpose at exactly the same time all across the world?” P-Orridge, “Thee Process Is Thee Produkt,”
Thee Psychick Bible, 407.
30
Drew Daniel connects TOPY’s gnosis-via-orgasm directly to Austin Osman Spare, describing Spare’s practice as
“occult onanism, in which a particularly powerful wish would be meditated upon while engaged in prolonged
acts of ‘self love’… .” Daniel, Twenty Jazz Funk Greats, 61.
90 D. SIEPMANN

who complete this satisfactorily will receive personal encouragement, sugges-

tions, and directions for the subsequent month’s ritual.”31
In later sections of the TOPY grimoire Thee Psychick Bible, P-Orridge
encourages the creation of ritual sigils in other formats, including but not
limited to “polaroids, photographs, cassette recordings, drawings (automatic
or otherwise), film or video. As with thee Sigil Paper, all these methods
should be used in thee ritual to heighten thee intensity ov what it is you do,
rather than document thee event.”32 The point is that any of these mechan-
isms are appropriate, as long as they provide new vistas for the exploration of
magickal technique and deep-seated ambitions within a ritual context.33 This
advocacy of mixed and recorded media as magickal substrata marks a
fascinating turn in not only chaos magick but Western occultism more
broadly, one that is neglected in prior contextualizations of Psychic TV and
TOPY.34 While Austin Osman Spare is widely credited with joining artistic
process and the technique of sigilization, P-Orridge explodes the boundaries
of exactly what that artistic process might entail. Indeed, Throbbing Gristle
and Psychic TV were both forerunners of audio sampling and video collages
in the context of rock and popular electronic music: P-Orridge’s privileging
of this mode comes as no surprise.
When P-Orridge and other TOPY operators work with recorded
media to create sigils for rituals—a Walkman and cassettes, a VCR
and videotapes, for instance—they necessarily splice, edit, or otherwise
reconfigure the recording’s original linearity and internal narrative. By
sculpting a novel arrangement, the magician becomes bonded to the
media object, conjuring a sigil that is abstract enough to obscure
intention. This recombinant sigil speaks to its author in new ways:
formerly fragmentary gibberish unveils, by way of ritual, a horizon of
perspectives never before considered. Yet when we carve media to
obtain sigils for ritual magick, P-Orridge notes, we invoke another
technique with revelatory power: the “cut-up” methodology of Brion
Gysin and William S. Burroughs.35 Through the shattered lens of the
“cut-up,” TOPY ritual reaches beyond merely clarifying or actualizing
intent, deftly subverting the cultural brainwashing with which, per
31
P-Orridge, “Part I—Thee Grey Book,” Thee Psychick Bible, 47. See also Genesis P-Orridge, “A TOPY Alphabet ov
Desire/Rise,” Thee Psychick Bible, 96–97.
32
Genesis P-Orridge, “A TOPY Alphabet ov Desire/Rise,” Thee Psychick Bible, 97.
33
Coyote 37, “Levels of Meaning in Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth,” Thee Psychick Bible, 67–68.
34
Examples of this neglect include Duggan, “Perennialism and Iconoclasm,” 95–96; and Partridge, “Occulture is
Ordinary,” 113–33. For more on the magickal potency of electronic media, see Cecil, “Even Further,” 392–93; and
Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs, The Third Mind (New York: Grove Press, 1982).
35
Gysin and Burroughs were P-Orridge’s foremost mentors in matters artistic and magickal. Burroughs originally
introduced P-Orridge to Gysin at P-Orridge’s urging in 1978, and the two “quickly established a master-disciple
relationship. …. ‘Whatever you do in your head,’ insisted Gysin, ‘bears the prerecorded pattern of your head. Cut
through that pattern and all patterns if you want something new … Cut through the word lines to hear a new
voice off the page.’ This method of progressing beyond current patterns of thought and belief was, for P-Orridge,
revolutionary.” Partridge, “Occulture is Ordinary,” Contemporary Esotericism, 126.
 UNHOLY PROGENY: PSYCHIC TV AND WITCH HOUSE 91

Burroughs’ paranoiac mythology, we have been inculcated since birth.36

Indeed, in chaos magick, belief is a tool, and wielding it as such
through artistic processes in rituals allows us to re-program ourselves
and seize back autonomy and agency from insidious subjugation. This is
a prime example of the co-extensive nature of Psychic TV and TOPY:
as Psychic TV wrote, recorded, and released songs employing the cut-up
technique for commercial distribution, TOPY spurred ten thousand
members in its network to similarly sculpt media as part of their private
ritual practice.
Grasped as a whole, many of the interrelated components selected by
P-Orridge to craft the foundation of TOPY—mailing sigils, media art in
magickal ritual, Burroughs’ virulent anti-authoritarianism, continental
Stations, localized Access Points, and so on—demonstrate an obsession
with the cultural impact of communications hubs, data conveyance networks,
and information technology.37 TOPY, in many respects, resembles a slow-
burn experiment to test the outer limits of what these knowledge exchange
systems make possible in the “alchemical jar” of popular culture. Worth
pondering are P-Orridge’s incisive writings about the magickal promise of
an increasingly networked humanity, eerily anticipating many of the ways in
which the Internet blankets our waking lives in the present.38

Prophecy
In Genesis P-Orridge’s famous 1991 essay “Thee Splinter Test,” s/he declares
that “… sampling, looping, and re-assembling both found materials and site-
specific sounds … is an alchemical, even a magical phenomenon.”39 When
we sample,
we are splintering consensual realities to test their substance utilizing the tools of
collision, collage, composition, decomposition, progression systems, “random
36
Genesis P-Orridge, “Behavioural Cut-Ups and Magick,” Thee Psychick Bible, 162.
37
Gregory Steirer argues that Throbbing Gristle’s dissemination of Industrial News—and other extracurricular
publications—demonstrate P-Orridge et al.’s early desire to “construct a popular information-aesthetics … to
aestheticize information rather than to politicize art.” Indeed, “Industrial News … and reference-laden interviews
given to the underground music press … served as prompts for further research/aesthetic exploration by fans.
They thus functioned as the musical equivalent of scholarly footnotes. … This emphasis on research eventually
came to be one of the dominant features of Industrial Culture itself,” spearheaded by a band that sought to
“empower non-professionals who, by definition, lacked institutional accreditation as scholars … information was
to be ‘liberated’ from the experts who produced and managed it.” Though Steirer does not connect this early
impulse to the later TOPY network, his analysis provides a vivid through-line to the Temple’s obsession with data
conveyance. Gregory Steirer, “The Art of Everyday Life and Death: Throbbing Gristle and the Aesthetics of
Neoliberalism,” Postmodern Culture 22, no. 2 (2012): 8–9.
38
After P-Orridge disassociated h/erself from TOPY in 1991, s/he sought to further the Temple’s original aims via
“The Process,” a short-lived online community formed in 1994 through partnership with members of the second-
wave industrial band Skinny Puppy. This collective never catalyzed the same size or intensity of followers as the
Temple but did incur legal action from the largest surviving Station (TOPYNA) and was largely defunct by 2001.
Leigh Neville, “Genesis P’Orridge: Pigface, Cyberspace, and Thee,” Music from the Empty Quarter 11 (1995): 30–32.
39
Genesis P-Orridge, “Thee Splinter Test,” Thee Psychick Bible, 142.
92 D. SIEPMANN

chance,” juxtapositions, cut-ups, hyperdelic vision and any other method available
that melts linear conceptions and reveals holographic webs and fresh spaces.40

But this endeavor takes on a new potency when the sampling operator plugs
into dynamic communications webs, networks that enable contact and shar-
ing with vast swaths of other humans. In such circumstances, sound material
that a magician re-possesses through the artistic lens of sigilization splinters
the boundaries of not only personal narrative and belief but also the con-
sensus reality that the control machines—state, church, family, medicine,
mass media, sexual convention, and so on—impose upon local and global
communities.41 This is exactly what TOPY attempted to fabricate, commen-
cing in 1981, through its series of interlocking and overlapping exchange/
dissemination grids: a mixture of analog (books, pamphlets, newsletters, fax
machines, telephones, postal mail, Xeroxes, Polaroid film) and corporeal
(Stations, Access Points) methods. Though limited by their technological
milieu, TOPY sought to create a rhizomatic entity that functionally
resembled the then-nascent Internet: an international information matrix—
largely accessed in private—that opened up troves of knowledge and experi-
ence formerly hidden or simply inconvenient to obtain. As P-Orridge mused
in “Thee Splinter Test,” with rare prescience,
[When] we travel … [on] the digital highways of our Futures … we are actually
splintering people and brain product freed of any of the implicit restraints or
restrictions of the five dimensions. … The Internet carrying audio/video, text,
pictures, data, and scrap books via modem … delivers a rush of potentiality that
was previously only advanced speculation. … Now, we can, with our brains, edit,
record, adjust, assemble, and transmit our deepest convictions, our most mundane
parables. … Clusters of temporary autonomous programs globally transmitted,
received, exchanged and jammed will generate a liberation from consumer forms
and linear scripts and make a splintered test of equal realities in a mass political
hallucination transcending time, body, and place … The constructed and ever
increasing digital concoction built from millions of sources that is commonly
referred to as “cyberspace” is accelerating towards deification, and separateness.
Towards the moment of a sentient awakening of its own consciousness and
agendas that we feel is more aptly described as the “psychosphere.”42

40
P-Orridge, “Thee Splinter Test,” Thee Psychick Bible, 143. Douglas Kahn alludes to the ability of samplers, and
sampling, to reify musical agency and signification, much in the way that a sonic sigil operates. Douglas Kahn,
“Editorial: An Unheard-of Organology,” Leonardo Music Journal 5 (1995): 3.
41
See Genesis P-Orridge, “DEFINE ‘HumanE,’” Thee Psychick Bible, 126; and P-Orridge, “Behavioural Cut-Ups and
Magick,” Thee Psychick Bible, 158–59. Sonic sigils also play a key role in confronting the disciplinary power of
words in control schemas. As P-Orridge declares, “there’s a certain magic with words …. All words are alive, in
the literal sense. It’s not just a metaphor. They have the ability to create and pressure people to bend and
manifest the agendas of those very words. Certain words are vying to control the direction of what you write.
They work a bit like the gene strands of DNA. …[Via techniques such as] tape-recorded loops … [I can] trap the
words in little games so that their particular agendas are confounded and something that’s a little closer to the
real story of what is happening comes through.” Daniel, Twenty Jazz Funk Greats, 146–47.
42
P-Orridge, “Thee Splinter Test,” Thee Psychick Bible, 143, 149–51. “Once logged on, we are vulnerable to all the
agendas, traumas, neuroses, and brilliances of all other logged on individuals. We have re-entered a pool. No
different to the pool of time or the gene pool.” Genesis P-Orridge, “Virtual Mirrors in Solid Time,” Thee Psychick
Bible, 274.
 UNHOLY PROGENY: PSYCHIC TV AND WITCH HOUSE 93

Indeed, the sheer number of people logging on, jacking in, and connecting
with one another, even in 1991, presaged the Internet’s ability to re-sculpt
belief systems and cultural orthodoxies through a kaleidoscopic flux of
sampled and cross-appropriated media. This “psychosphere” promised for
TOPY and other chaos magicians a brave new world for reclaiming indivi-
dual destinies and communal directionality. Gysin and Burroughs, P-Orridge
asserts, remind us how the magicians of any era equip themselves with the
most cutting-edge techniques, tools, and skillsets available. Just as TOPY’s
formative years saw the utilization of analog and person-to-person grids, the
Internet is simply the most advanced weapon yet imagined for re-crafting a
preferred version of reality.43 P-Orridge was among the vanguard of those
underscoring the Internet’s ability to amplify the magickal potency of art,
particularly when framed in the allegorical structure of a sigil.44
Three decades after the founding of Psychic TV and TOPY, an analogous
music and art network, “witch house,” was reaching its own zenith. But while
TOPY employed many compounding communications methods to interface
with the disaffected, witch house’s entire existence as an artist and fan
collective was predicated on the ubiquity of the Internet.45 “Thee Splinter
Test” and other essays by P-Orridge, the early organizational apparatus of
TOPY, and the artistic interchanges of Temple and Psychic TV contributors
jointly prophesied the emergence of this new occult music community.

Witch house
Witch house is the most prominent title for a global yet diffuse electronic music
network that saw its roots in the early 2010s, before gathering momentum and
reaching its apogee in the early 2010s before declining back into relative
obscurity after 2013.46 The most recent discourse investigates its status as one
43
Genesis P-Orridge, “Virtual Mirrors in Solid Time,” Thee Psychick Bible, 262–63. See also Genesis P-Orridge, “Magick
Squares and Future Beats: The Magickal Process and Methods of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin,” Thee
Psychick Bible, 293.
44
P-Orridge, “Virtual Mirrors in Solid Time,” Thee Psychick Bible, 267.
45
“From very early on, there was a heavy focus on the unhampered sharing of information, hidden or otherwise. All
one had to do was let one’s interests and areas of research be known through newsletters and other channels,
and one was certain to receive something of interest. A secondhand book, long out of print. A compendium of
xeroxes from someone’s equally enthusiastic archive. A cassette tape copy of some recordings never released on
record or broadcast on radio. Seeing the global TOPY Network as a precursor to the Internet is not far-fetched at
all. The first generation developers of ‘cyberculture’ were certainly aware of—and some of them [were] even
active in—TOPY and its ideas ….” Abrahamsson, “Foreword,” Thee Psychick Bible, 11. See also Louv,
“Introduction,” Thee Psychick Bible, 26.
46
The following discussion builds on the recent work of other scholars who grapple with disparate music collectives
or communities—bound by the Internet—in both electronic and non-electronic musics. See, for instance,
Michael Bullock, “Self-Idiomatic Music: An Introduction,” Leonardo 43, no. 2 (2010): 141–44; Christophe Den
Tandt, “From Craft to Corporate Interfacing: Rock Musicianship in the Age of Music Television and Computer-
Programmed Music,” Popular Music and Society 27, no. 2 (2004): 139–60; Antti-Ville Kärjä, “A Prescribed
Alternative Mainstream: Popular Music and Canon Formation,” Popular Music 25, no. 1 (2006): 3–19; Kay
Kaufman Shelemay, “Musical Communities: Rethinking the Collective in Music,” Journal of the American
Musicological Society 64, no. 2 (2011): 349–90; Jennifer Shryane, “‘A small Utopia’: Unterstützer not Anhänger.
Einstürzende Neubauten’s Supporter Initiative,” Popular Music 29, no. 3 (2010): 373–96; Paul Théberge, Any Sound
94 D. SIEPMANN

of the so-called micro-genres that emerged during this late 2000s–early 2010s
timeframe, such as “chillwave,” “vaporwave,” and “seapunk.”47 A sizable portion
of this taxonomy debate is devoted to witch house’s defiance of genre entirely,
with many labeling it a chimera of the online music journalism industry,
ravenous for catchy headlines and (fake) trends that drive clicks and inflate
advertising revenues.48
Witch house’s sound palette references several disparate features, such as
chopped and screwed hip-hop, industrial music, second-wave goth rock, death
rock, dream pop, ambient electronica, and experimental noise music.
Prominent instrumentation includes both digital and analog synthesizers,
found-sound percussion and electronic drum machines, distorted samples,
and processed vocals (typically pitch-shifted either up or down) that are barely
audible or whose lyrics are indiscernible. These instrument voices are strate-
gically joined to evoke contrasting styles unfolding in tandem: hip-hop drum
machine patterns, particularly with a trap affect, paired with warbling dark-
timbre synths from goth rock, for instance. This might be juxtaposed against a
cacophonous choir of industrial noise samples, such as sheet metal clanging or
the distant atmospherics of churning machines, producing a schizophrenic and
profoundly unsettled aural landscape. Witch house’s characteristic dirge-like
tempi augment its psychedelic, even narcotic nihilism, a deliberately perverse
take on what Milan Kundera calls “the pleasure of slowness,” a sonic reaction
to the stimulus overload of the digital world.49 These features can be heard
prominently in songs such as: Salem’s “King Night”; BL▲CK † CEILING’s
“WVFFLIFE” (“Wuff/Rough Life”); †‡† (“Ritualz”)’s “Psychic Teens”; Ω╪Ω
(“Sycorax”)’s “Ordo †emplis Prole†Δris”; Mater Suspiria Vision’s “The

You Can Imagine: Making Music / Consuming Technology (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1997); and
Aksel H. Tjora, “The Groove in the Box: A Technologically Mediated Inspiration in Electronic Dance Music,” Popular
Music 28, no. 2 (2009): 161–77.
47
A plethora of other genre titles are also used interchangeably with the witch house cadre of artists, including
drag, screwgaze, cave crunk, ghost juke, crimsonwave, zombie rave, ghost drone, drag, and the ill-conceived
“rape gaze.” Scott Wright, “Scene and heard: Drag,” The Guardian, March 8, 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/
music/musicblog/2010/mar/08/scene-heard-drag (accessed March 20, 2016). For critical inquiry regarding the
peer micro-genre of vaporwave, and the notion of micro-genre writ large, see Grafton Tanner, Babbling Corpse:
Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts (Alresford, UK: Zero Books, 2016).
48
Andrew Necci, “Witch House: Listen With The Lights On,” RVA Mag, August 9, 2010, http://rvamag.com/articles/
full/8762/witch-house-listen-with-the-lights-on (accessed March 20, 2016). See also Todd Brooks, “The Genesis of
Naming a Genre: Witch House,” http://pendunyc.com/events/the-genesis-of-naming-a-genre-witch-house-by-
todd-pendu (accessed March 20, 2016); Joe Colly, “Ghosts in the Machine,” Pitchfork Media, May 24, 2010,
http://pitchfork.com/features/article/7806-ghosts-in-the-machine (accessed March 19, 2016); Bram E. Gieben,
“Guest Editorial: Enter the Witch House,” Dangerous Minds, July 29, 2011, http://dangerousminds.net/com
ments/guest_editorial_enter_the_witch_house (accessed March 20, 2016); Sam Hockley-Smith, “The Short Life,
Weird Death, and Mild Rebirth of the Witch House Genre,” Grantland, June 9, 2015, http://grantland.com/
hollywood-prospectus/the-short-life-weird-death-and-mild-rebirth-of-the-witch-house-genre (accessed March 19,
2016); and Carter Maness, “Brooklyn’s Vanishing Witch House,” The New York Press, August 25, 2010, http://www.
nypress.com/brooklyns-vanishing-witch-house (accessed March 20, 2016). For a robust examination of genre
theory, see Timothy J. Dowd and William G. Roy, “What is Sociological about Music?,” Annual Review of Sociology
36 (2010): 183–203; and Jennifer C. Lena and Richard A. Peterson, “Classification as Culture: Types and
Trajectories of Music Genres,” American Sociological Review 73, no. 5 (2008): 697–718.
49
Nina Colosi, “The Antennae of the Race,” Leonardo 35, no. 5 (2002): 580.
 UNHOLY PROGENY: PSYCHIC TV AND WITCH HOUSE 95

Labyrinths of Venice”; White Ring’s “Suffocation”; and CVL† SH‡† (“Cult

Shit”)’s “┼ VNDƦ///DΔ///$HΣ3†Z ┼” (“Under the Sheets”).
Witch house’s accompanying visual and design elements are also alluring.
Official record releases—as well as supplemental fan art and videos posted along-
side songs and albums on social media platforms—feature a gossamer and
washed-out digital patina, drawing on imagery from horror and underground
films, gothic poetry and literature, and various eras of occultism. Omnipresent
tropes include collage composition, filtered and re-touched black and white
photography, and the substitution of non-literal Unicode or ASCII typography
for witch house composers’ aliases and song titles.50 Examples with translation
include: BL§§D ØU† (“Blissed Out”); oOoOO (“Oh”); †+DEΔD+VIRGIN+†
(“Dead Virgin”); GuMMy†Be▲R! (“Gummy Bear”); Gr†LLGR†LL (“Grill
Grill”); and MΔS▴CΔRA (“Mascara”). This symbology functions as a crypto-
graph—a coding method that keeps the movement and its music distant from
casual Internet searches, but also generates a “buzz” that amplifies its cultural
desirability, precisely by being onerous to access.51 Graphic novelist and author
Warren Ellis remarks how witch house “generate[s] a sort of lexical darknet by
using keyterms search engines can’t parse; witch house strives to defeat the idea
that ‘on the Internet, there is no real underground anymore.’”52 Most signifi-
cantly, witch house symbology appears saturated with occult signification,
observes DJ and music critic Dafydd McKaharay: “Occult imagery has been one
of the most stable aspects of the ever-changing meme [of witch house]. Symbols
imprint into your brain, and they also say ‘look at this.’”53 These Unicode and
ASCII symbols are in some respects a more unifying element of the witch house
community than any one musical referent or trait.
In each origin story told, witch house’s tangled roots invariably trace back to
Houston and the late DJ Screw’s (Robert Earl Davis, Jr.) eponymous innovation:
chopped and screwed hip-hop. This technique, first documented in 1990, involved
his physical slowing of a mechanical turntable platter while recording hip-hop
vinyl onto cassettes, conjuring an oozing and lugubrious sound world whose
absence of inertia takes on a menacing glower.54 The transference of DJ Screw’s

50
For a foundational discussion on popular music subcultures appropriating symbols, see Dick Hebdige, Subculture:
The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge Publishing, 2005).
51
Witch house adopts what Arielle Saiber calls the global-secluded paradox, assisting the network in its genre-
resistance: “when has a[n electronic] music ever been quite so paradoxical: global and isolationist, ardently
seeking listener participation and aggressively challenging it, label coining and label rejecting, exalting the
synthetic and claiming to produce the realest of real sounds?” Arielle Saiber, “The Polyvalent Discourse of
Electronic Music,” PMLA 122, no. 5 (2007): 1614.
52
Warren Ellis, “†‡† (Cross Doublecross Cross?),” June 7, 2010, http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=9751 (accessed
March 20, 2016). The same sort of “lexical darknet” is employed in leetspeak (a portmanteau of “elite speak”),
originally developed on the Internet bulletin board systems (BBSs) of the 1980s by expert users seeking to show
their sophistication within the era’s computer culture but also surmount the filters of BBS moderators which
censored discussion of illegal activities such as hacking.
53
Alisa Nizhniy, “Music and Culture: Witch House,” Harvard, August 11, 2011, http://www.alisaniz.com/#!witch-
house/c1ppm (accessed March 26, 2016).
54
Michael Floyd, “Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch to Live,” Temporary Art Review, October 12, 2011, http://
temporaryartreview.com/survival-of-the-witchiest (accessed March 20, 2016).
96 D. SIEPMANN

technique to the burgeoning dark electronic music scene of the middle of the first
decade of the 21st century arrived via individuals such as DJ and label-owner
Robert Disaro.55 Disaro spent his adolescence steeped in the sonic culture of
Houston, frequenting car shows where the music of iconic Southern hip-hop
acts such as Three 6 Mafia, Chamillionaire, and UGK were featured. In 2007, he
launched Disaro Records, whose earliest signed band from Traverse City,
Michigan—notorious for their “gauzy, gothic stripe of electronic music”—would
become witch house’s agreed-upon progenitor act, Salem.56 Soon, a slew of
comparable labels were birthed, each with their own constellation of dark electro-
nic music acts on the roster, most notably Robin Carolan’s Tri Angle Records.57
But none of the aforementioned were the catalyst for the witch house
moniker, which came as a tongue-in-cheek neologism from Travis Egedy,
who performs under the alias Pictureplane. While constructing a “Best of
2009” laundry list for the online music and culture publication Pitchfork
Media, Egedy satirically coined the term to describe the spun-down, occult-
tinged electronic music that he and his compatriots were crafting.58 As
electronic music festival impresario Todd “Pendu” Brooks relates,
many read over the article without another thought, but there was one individual in
particular … who grabbed onto the term and used the Internet to spread the germ
that created a new genre. In late January of this year [2010], this individual logged on
to Last.FM and tagged 14 artists they saw as part of this dark sound including
S4LEM, oOoOO, Clapsclap, Mater Suspiria Vision, Zola Jesus, and more.59

The provocateur in Brooks’ telling was the writer and concert promoter
Daniel Jones, known more prominently online as “Gucci Goth.”60 As of
November 2010, 524 Last.FM users followed suit, tagging artists under the
witch house umbrella. While not considered a critical mass by contemporary
standards, Brooks reminds us that
so many of those people have their own blogs, or are writers for magazines and
online journals and have a large readership … [that] from those 524 people,
55
Jon Caramanica, “Seeping Out of Houston, Slowly,” The New York Times, November 4, 2010, http://www.nytimes.
com/2010/11/07/arts/music/07witch.html?_r=0 (accessed March 26, 2016).
56
Brooks, “The Genesis of Naming a Genre: Witch House.”
57
Floyd, “Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch to Live.”
58
From the countdown list: “7. ‘Witch House’: 2009 was the beginning of the ‘witch house’ style. Also known as
‘black house’ or ‘occult house.’ Coined and popularized by SHAMS and myself, two practitioners and advocators
of the witch house movement. Mark our words, 2010 will be straight up witchy. Check the fabulously dark ‘In
Your Eyes’ by Denver/Amsterdam band Modern Witch, ‘Pillow Talk’ by SHAMS, or the music video for ‘Goth Star’
[by Egedy himself] for examples of the witch house aesthetic.” Tyler Grisham and Travis Egedy, “Guest List: Best
of 2009,” Pitchfork Media, December 11, 2009, http://pitchfork.com/features/guest-lists/7740-guest-list-best-of
-2009/?page=4 (accessed April 10, 2016).
59
Part of the music social media platform Last.FM’s core functionality is the ability to tag genre labels onto artists,
thereby giving titling and interpretative/curatorial power to their user base.
60
Brooks further explains “ … there was nothing ‘house’ about most of the artists [Jones] tagged on Last.FM and
Egedy was specifically referring to dance music that was both ‘house’ and ‘witchy.’ [Jones] expanded on the term
beyond the intended usage which is definitely where the confusion surrounding the term begins.” Brooks, “The
Genesis of Naming a Genre: Witch House.” For more regarding Jones’ role in the early proliferation of the witch
house label, see also Nizhniy, “Music and Culture: Witch House.”
 UNHOLY PROGENY: PSYCHIC TV AND WITCH HOUSE 97

thousands and thousands are learning about witch house and are accepting it as
legitimate, or writing rants about how much they hate it.61

By August 2011, 1,574 people were actively employing the witch house tag on
Last.FM.62
Witch house was one of the first online music communities to emerge whose
creators and participants had interfaced continuously with the Internet since early
childhood. For instance, Juan Carlos Lobo Garcia, composing under the moniker
†‡† (Ritualz), crafted his first EP in 2010 for Disaro Records while never once
meeting (in person) another witch house artist, or an individual affiliated with the
label. Garcia relates how “we were all growing up as the Internet got bigger during
the mid-to-late-‘90s, so a lot of the culture we’ve been in touch with comes from
it.”63 Indeed, the witch house network’s infrastructure is built around social media
platforms such as Last.FM, Myspace, Tumblr, SoundCloud, and other populist
media hosting and curation forums in which composers, visual artists, and
designers share their work with one another and their fan base following, often
anonymously.64 Its communal fabric is weaved throughout these platforms, where
artistic ideas are proposed, exchanged, and commented upon, and finished works
are made available for limitless public access.65 In this vein, Alisa Nizhniy posits
witch house as an alternate forum of cultural convergence,
not tied together by a specific sound as much as it is cohered by a lifestyle: artists who
share an interest in practicing magic, flaunting witchcraft imagery, and creating
musical and visual content to exchange with likeminded peers through the Internet.66

Travis Egedy himself concurs, characterizing witch house as beyond a sonic

profile entirely and instead resembling “a visual language that’s Internet
based,” an online clan of networked peers swapping occult-derived music
compositions and variegated imagery.67
61
Brooks, “The Genesis of Naming a Genre: Witch House.”
62
Nizhniy, “Music and Culture: Witch House.”
63
Beverly Bryan, “†‡† (Ritualz): Anonymous Witch-House Musician Draws from Pop’s Dark Side,” Alarm Magazine,
March 2, 2012, http://alarm-magazine.com/2012/%E2%80%A0%E2%80%A1%E2%80%A0-anonymous-witch-
house-musician-draws-from-pops-dark-side (accessed March 20, 2016).
64
Caramanica, “Seeping Out of Houston, Slowly.” “Witch house has incubated and mutated on free music sharing
platforms such as SoundCloud and Bandcamp, and survives and breeds on private forums … [as well as] invite-
only Facebook groups … run[ning] miniature secret societies and covens. These technologies … are core to the
distribution of the music ….” Gieben, “Guest Editorial: Enter the Witch House.” For further research on Internet-
dependent music communities, see René T. A. Lysloff, “Musical Community on the Internet: An On-Line
Ethnography,” Cultural Anthropology 18, no. 2 (2003): 233–63.
65
For additional discussion about political and social resistance via Internet music subcultures, see Chris Gibson,
“Subversive Sites: Rave Culture, Spatial Politics and the Internet in Sydney, Australia,” Area 31, no. 1 (1999):
19–33; Scott R. Hutson, “The Rave: Spiritual Healing in Modern Western Subcultures,” Anthropological Quarterly
73, no. 1 (2000): 35–49; and Brian Wilson, “Ethnography, the Internet, and Youth Culture: Strategies for Examining
Social Resistance and ‘Online-Offline’ Relationships,” Canadian Journal of Education 29, no. 1 (2006): 307–28.
66
Nizhniy, “Music and Culture: Witch House.” “‘There’s an interest in superstition and the occult, but filtered
through the very modern mindset of individuals who have grown up glued to the Internet,’ says [Robin] Carolan.
‘It adds to the feeling of isolation, melancholy and loneliness.’ That perspective has helped forge a strong visual
identity … that echoes the sound’s darker notes, as well as its bone-dry humour. ‘There’s a lot of re-
contextualization of religious and mythical symbolism.’” Wright, “Scene and heard: Drag.”
67
Nizhniy, “Music and Culture: Witch House.”
98 D. SIEPMANN

Comparative dynamics
Psychic TV/TOPY and witch house are intertwined on two levels. First,
the aesthetic: their development of unique symbologies emphasizing
occult icons and gestures; multimedia saturation in both live perfor-
mances and dissemination channels; and heterogeneous blends of musical
styles, with a focus on a dark, psychedelic affect. Second, the logistic: as
loose-knit, international networks of autonomous agents, bound together
via correspondence and operating with blurred distinction between tradi-
tional roles in music communities—band or artist collective, genre or
movement, fan club or cult, amateur tinkerer or professional curator,
and so on. But most meaningful is how in both cases, camaraderie was
forged among many thousands of users through a common set of occult
stylings and explorations, made possible only by re-purposing readily
available communication technologies. Indeed, individuals both in TOPY
circa 1981 and witch house circa 2011 play a similar function: that of the
synapse—in the words of Christopher Partridge,
gather[ing] information from places off the web, then distribut[ing] it throughout
the network, and in turn tak[ing] information from the web and mak[ing] it
available to local members. … The network is organized in such a way that it
encourages each self to become the centre of its own network.68

Within both communities—the physical of Psychic TV/TOPY, and the virtual of

witch house—participants serve as ever-proliferating data nodes and traversals. Yet
despite this significant likeness, the two communities’ engagement with the occult
could not be more discordant. This tension is palpable through three overarching
dimensions: expressive utopic and dystopic paradigms; competing ideas of demo-
cratization in Western magick and music dissemination; and the performance of
empowerment and negation within the communication networks of music
subcultures.69

Occult utopia, occult dystopia

The purpose of TOPY’s magickal practice is restoration and introspection:
through the allegorical structure of sigilization and ritual, TOPY participants
seek to “[make] things happen according to your desires in order to maximize
control over one’s life and immediate environment[,] to create a universe that
68
Christopher Partridge, The Re-Enchantment of the West, Vol. 2: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Music,
and Occulture (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006), 160.
69
This essay is not the first instance of a connection being made between Psychic TV/TOPY and witch house. See
Travis Egedy, “ERYONEZ TALKINGZ ABOUT WITCH HOUSE,” November 9, 2010, http://plainpictures.blogspot.
com/2010/11/eryonez-talkingz-about-witch-house.html (accessed April 9, 2016); Travis Egedy, “13 RULES TO
MAKE A GREAT WITCH HOUSE SONG,” November 22, 2010, http://plainpictures.blogspot.com/2010/11/13-rules-
to-make-great-witch-house-song.html (accessed April 9, 2016); and Capitalist Lion Tamer, “Dinowalrus –
Godstar (Psychic TV Cover),” May 23, 2012, https://minorscratches.wordpress.com/2012/05/23/dinowalrus-
godstar-psychic-tv-cover/ (accessed April 9, 2016).
 UNHOLY PROGENY: PSYCHIC TV AND WITCH HOUSE 99

is perfecting in its kindness towards you.”70 The TOPY network actively re-
frames the world’s disarray through a transformative procedure of the opera-
tor’s own design, and when disciples engage artistic processes and seize the
radical pragmatism of sigilization, they not only heighten their subjectivity, but
directly contest the oppressive forces of consensus reality: “sigils break down
this [control] conditioning, awaken thee possibility ov change and experiment,
give back thee joy ov a life rich in experience and challenge.”71 The TOPY
aspiration was to change the world on the scale of the individual (“a dialogue
begun between each Temple Initiate and their true will”), while edging towards
a more utopian global condition—“creat[ing] an alternative system ov infor-
mation exchange to counter thee spread ov lies disseminated by the mass
media and thee governments ov Control.”72 Its magick was a particular sort,
“designed for the blank-eyed, TV-flattened, prematurely abyss-dwelling youth
of the late Twentieth Century,” while the TOPY cult’s subterranean operation
embodied an “anarchic and artistic response to the ever-marching and ever-
homogenizing process of globalization.”73
Witch house appropriates the tools of TOPY—its strategies, patterns, man-
euverings, and evasions—to put forward a contrasting judgment against
humanity’s liberation and uplift. Dystopic nihilism is no stranger to dark
rock and electronic music genres, but its omnipresence here, caked onto
every surface, is striking. Debasement presses against the listener in witch
house’s morass of sound and symbol, whether conjured by the sickening
loop and churn of over-processed Top 40 pop song samples or strobing
music videos of inverted crosses concocted to nauseate.74 Witch house is
situated by critics as part of a present-day Goth culture revival, which
Gabriele Eckart posits as a reaction against “totalizing computer simulations
and Internet cyberspace, [which] terrifies us ‘as a threat to human identity.’”
“Gothic expressions in art reassert the body by recovering it from simulation,”
she suggests.75 If true, then witch house’s practitioners are counterrevolution-
ary partisans par excellence, embracing a narrative of decline while relishing
collaboration with the cyberpunk assemblage that quickens humanity’s per-
ceived descent into a new dark age of machine servitude. This impulse towards
accelerationism—to speed up a broken future’s foretold arrival, so civilization
shatters that much faster—infests witch house’s auditory and optical

70
P-Orridge, “Magick Squares and Future Beats,” Thee Psychick Bible, 277.
71
Kali Four Zero, “Sigils: For Kali and Eden,” Thee Psychick Bible, 87.
72
Louv, “Introduction,” Thee Psychick Bible, 21; and Kali Four Zero, “Sigils: For Kali and Eden,” Thee Psychick Bible, 85.
73
Louv, “Introduction,” Thee Psychick Bible, 17–18.
74
Witch house appears to qualify for Douglas Kahn’s threshold: “But no one, to my knowledge, yet composes
musically in a semiotic framework within which … the vertical organization of encoded elements strains at the
coherence of a passage through associative irregularities, chains, and din—the role formerly reserved for
dissonance.” Douglas Kahn, “Track Organology,” October 55 (1990): 74.
75
Gabriele Eckart, “The German Gothic Subculture,” German Studies Review 28, no. 3 (2005): 548. See also Karen
Collins, “Dead Channel Surfing: The Commonalities between Cyberpunk Literature and Industrial Music,” Popular
Music 24, no. 2 (2005): 165–78.
100 D. SIEPMANN

bandwidth, promulgating an apocalyptic affect. Witch house craves the resur-

rection of “the kind of atmosphere generated by the seminal Goblin sound-
track for Suspiria, the creeping, schizophrenic suspense … at the heart of Twin
Peaks, [or] the final twenty minutes of The Wicker Man … an amoral dystopia
of sound and vision,” according to Bram Gieben.76 There is no gradual
perfection of ourselves through magick in the witch house endgame, just
revelry in the decadent rot of which we all partake. Psychic TV/TOPY’s
experiment of individual discipline is worlds removed from the gleeful corro-
sion of witch house’s maleficent hedonism.

The democratization of magick

The modern continuum of Western occult practice, beginning in the early
twentieth century and stretching to the present, manifests a significant shift
in the idea of the esoteric: who had the privilege of learning about and
performing magick; how were others brought “into the fold”; and what was
the public’s exposure, if any? Beginning in 1909, Aleister Crowley was the
first to write down and publish rituals that were the closely guarded secrets of
the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Prior to Crowley and a few
compatriots, this knowledge was literally occult, or hidden, with initiates
into the Order swearing oaths to maintain the concealment of the informa-
tion. Shortly thereafter in 1913, Austin Osman Spare began introducing
individualized artistic process and sigils as integral to ritual, amplifying its
sway. Sigil magick, particularly as adopted by Peter Carroll and other early
chaos magicians (1978), distilled lessons from the Victorians’ heavy tomes
and grimoires (as well as other traditions) into a single, flexible set of
techniques, empowering each operator to tailor their own practices. But it
was TOPY’s model (1981) that significantly advanced this erosion of the
esoteric in contemporary magick, as first begun by Crowley. For Temple
members, the lone act of sigilization and gnosis is still regenerative, but
sending the charged sigil to complete strangers in Brighton, UK—with an
organizational aim towards aggregating TOPY’s unconscious will in one
place—shook the foundation of magick, re-sculpting private ritual in a way
that blurred individual and communal objectives. Yet despite this, and
TOPY’s status as a public occult project, the ritual deeds themselves
remained closed, guarded acts; no one else was privy to the design and
charging of the sigil through gnosis, nor the operator’s magickal intent.
Indeed, the mail delivery of many thousands of these sigils to secure vaults
at the TOPYUK headquarters (to this day, undisturbed) ironically preserved
the sanctity of each individual’s ritual exploits.

76
Gieben, “Guest Editorial: Enter the Witch House.”
 UNHOLY PROGENY: PSYCHIC TV AND WITCH HOUSE 101

Seizing Genesis P-Orridge’s assertion that spliced media art is also

bathed in magickal energy, particularly when unleashed on the Internet,
witch house inverts TOPY’s sigil-mailing practice. Witch house creators
plainly graft occult symbols and referents across the whole of their
visual output, with hyperreal sonic sampling serving a similar musical
function. When a witch house composer or visual artist posts a song,
video, or collage to a social media platform, they wantonly share that
collection of occult icons and invocations with the web’s entirety; their
appearance of ritual not only becomes a public record for the entire
“psychosphere” to behold, but it acquires digital permanence as well.77
By inviting this voyeurism, witch house dissolves any remaining vestige
of the hermetic in Western occultism, perfecting an inversion of this
formerly esoteric practice into a wholly exoteric one.78 Witch house
democratizes the appearance of active occult practice—the audio and
visual performance of ritual itself, an inviolable space even for TOPY—
by urging the entire online world to bear witness. Indeed, this devel-
opment is also partially reliant on the concurrent populism of media
propagation technology. The widespread availability of reliable high-
speed Internet and low-barrier online sharing platforms spurred witch
house artists to become autonomous musical splinter cells, able to
launch an insurgency that turned inside-out the once cloistered veneer
of Western magick and further dismantled the lingering hierarchies and
privileges of Victorian mysticism.

Occult performance, empowerment, and negation

Witch house was able to disseminate its bleak compositions online,
suffused with occult semiotics, to a far broader audience than TOPY
could ever imagine. But one question, only hinted at so far, is whether
any of these sonic or visual creations were actually intended to be a
medium of magickal practice. In other words, was witch house sincere
in its magickal ambition? Honestly, there is no way for viewers and
listeners to ever know with certainty whether the symbols and samples
that girded the witch house aesthetic were actual sigils, permeated with
the resolve to somehow change the world (for good or ill). The private
intent of the producers of witch house music, collages, or text fragments is
simply unknowable, to an even greater extent than a traditional author’s
desideratum is cryptic. This query goes beyond whether witch house was a
77
It is worth recalling that sigil destruction or distancing is key to chaos magick ritual success, as demonstrated in
TOPY.
78
The immense scale of the modern Internet functions as its own sort of concealing device, a confounding variable
for any deliberately exoteric approach. Even if the occultism of witch house cultural products is on full display,
the sheer magnitude of their intersecting online platforms suggests that few users stumble across these artists by
happenstance. There is a premise of intentionality behind most who discover a witch house crevasse.
102 D. SIEPMANN

communal “performance” of occultism.79 Scrutinizing the scope and scale

of TOPY’s real-world praxis—from administrative infrastructure, to trea-
tises, to Psychic TV, and beyond—witch house appears to have adopted
many of its fashion, visual, and sonic attributes without any verifiable
commitment to magick. A charitable reading is that while both are
“world-creating,” one amounts to a skin-deep appropriation of an aes-
thetic. A more critical assessment is that, by exploiting analogous devices
and techniques, witch house claims Psychic TV/TOPY’s mantle while
casting aside its core credos, demolishing its progenitor’s cultural, ethical,
and occult agenda through false pretense.
This is seen by juxtaposing the sigil/symbol dissemination methods that
Psychic TV/TOPY and witch house separately bring to bear. TOPY’s frame-
work encourages thousands of individuals to simultaneously create sigils with
concealed meanings, which are then sent to a single person, usually Genesis
P-Orridge or one of h/er top lieutenants, who is unable to decipher each
sigil’s unique signification.80 This empowers Temple members, as the act of
discarding the sigil in the mail liberates them from its presence and facilitates
the object of desire’s entry into the subconscious mind. Once the occult
conceit of the sigil is complete, the operator acquires rejuvenated agency
(placebo or not). Witch house, on the other hand, propagates the reverse of
that “flow.” Here, single individuals post music and visuals to social media or
file hosting platforms online, reaching thousands engaged in the witch house
subculture but without any known occult concepts, such as sigils, in play. In
other words, while the vapors of the occult in witch house may be suffocat-
ingly thick, they are correspondingly evanescent, just outside the fan’s grasp;
participants are denied the ability to engage with the alleged magickal
elements of this music and art on an equivalent functional plane as TOPY.
This saps their agency, neutralizing the chance to connect fruitfully with the
machinations merely teased within—there is no reparative payoff when a
fabricated aura of mysticism is the creator’s only discernable intent.
Witch house contrives a bait-and-switch, one that problematizes
P-Orridge’s original heralding of an Internet with magickal efficacy through
media saturation. The inability to know whether sigils are actually present in
a witch house artwork carries with it a corresponding denial of purpose

79
There is no doubt that a certain amount of the witch house network’s online presence is performative, focused
on the exchange and accrual of cultural capital—otherwise known as “coolness.” For more on this notion, see
Melissa Gronlund, “From Narcissism to the Dialogic: Identity in Art after the Internet,” Afterall: A Journal of Art,
Context and Enquiry 37 (2014): 4–13.
80
“Another highly interesting aspect of this [sigil] art is that it is in many ways an anti-art. It’s not art made
specifically for other people to see, and thereby it doesn’t fit in with the contemporary ideals of pleasing an art
market. Here we can return to the very origins of art (cave paintings, etc.). The idea was not to have a glass of
wine together with tribal kin in a cozy cave, to self-aggrandize through witty ironic criticisms. The idea was to
impose one’s will on the world outside your own personal sphere, or that of the tribe. Art as magical evocation.
Whether other members or other tribes actually could see or understand what one had inscribed or painted was
beside the point.” Abrahamsson, “Foreword,” Thee Psychick Bible, 14.
 UNHOLY PROGENY: PSYCHIC TV AND WITCH HOUSE 103

premising the composition’s creation. Indeed, while TOPY sigils mask the
operator’s intent in a ritual context for magickal gains, witch house’s cumu-
lative cryptograph—Unicode, ASCII, glyphs, and heavily-processed samples
—mask the presence of sigils themselves. This is a crucial distinction, intro-
ducing a plight in which not only occult purpose, but group ambition and
narrative is left open to appropriation as well. One might look no further
than Travis Egedy, who by generating the controversial hype of the witch
house moniker, was able to overdetermine the communal destiny of a music
network formerly content to remain in the margins.

Conclusion
Numerous paths for future musicological work have been insinuated, but not
explored, throughout this project. Foremost among these are implications for
subculture theory in popular music—even though witch house’s embrace of
occultism was Janus-faced, TOPY may be similarly duplicitous in its strategic
co-option of subcultural trappings and behaviors. Unlike other youth collec-
tives linked through artistry, identity, or lifestyle, TOPY’s tactics of cultural
propaganda demanded the manufacture of mythology as its own end. For the
Temple, a key ingredient of their “alchemical jar” was conjuring themselves as
an inexorable, revolutionary movement in the popular imagination, a method
that defies even post-subculture analysis in the form of scenes or neo-tribes.81
Second, in order to flesh out the usefulness of an occult epistemology for
musicology, Psychic TV/TOPY’s relationship to other artists who privilege
chaos magick as a genuine working method—such as the bands Coil and
Current 93—deserves sustained exploration. Third, TOPY was but one sect
of chaos magick practitioners in a dense web of sister collectives, many of
which are actively evolving in the present: some with formal organization, such
as the Illuminates of Thanateros, and others more loosely knit, tying together
authors, poets, visual artists, graphic designers, musicians, and media artists.
Where does the story of Psychic TV/TOPY lay in this creative multiverse that
stretches far beyond the confines of musician and fan communities?
The cultural engineering of Psychic TV and Thee Temple ov Psychick
Youth provided a prototype for outcast musicians, artists, intellectuals, and
activists to forge a subversive knowledge exchange hub through a patchwork
convergence of communication platforms. In this way, Psychic TV/TOPY
was a carefully curated music and magick community like none yet imagined
or implemented at that point in history. Though Psychic TV/TOPY was an
analog relic by the time the young Internet provocateurs of witch house
81
See the conceptual analysis of Andy Bennett, “Subcultures or Neo-Tribes? Rethinking the Relationship Between
Youth, Style, and Musical Taste,” Sociology 33, no. 3 (1999): 599–617; David Hesmondhalgh, “Subcultures, Scenes,
or Tribes? None of the Above,” Journal of Youth Studies 8, no. 1 (2005): 21–40; and Zizi Papacharissi, A Networked
Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (New York: Routledge, 2011).
104 D. SIEPMANN

began their ascendance, this dark electronic music network, in effect, dusted
off the blueprint for Genesis P-Orridge’s invention and selected a hodge-
podge of contemporary social media and egalitarian data-hosting sites to
appropriate—just as TOPY initiates had seized on fax machines and post
office boxes in 1981. When P-Orridge originally foretold the magickal power
of media sigils exchanged on the Internet, s/he also sketched the framework
for Psychic TV/TOPY’s futurist inheritor to adopt. Yet s/he lacked one
additional insight, that the arrival of this cyberculture prophecy would
come at a steep price: the abandonment of any sense of committed move-
ment-building, as exemplified by Psychic TV/TOPY.
This article’s effort to historicize these two collaborative music networks,
and explicate the dynamics of their relationship, also deliberately opens the
door to imagine what the next iteration of a global, magick-saturated music
community might look like. The coming version, however, will likely adopt a
new slew of unforeseen communications tools that are able to conceal their
activities, either in the cyberspace we know now, or on as-yet unconstructed
and homologous iterations of the Web. Contemporaneously with witch house’s
steep decline in 2013, revelations leaked to the media concerning widespread
government collection of telecommunications metadata. Exposed by Edward
Snowden and others, these disclosures partially vindicated the then-paranoid,
now-proven fears of Burroughs and P-Orridge, having framed their agitations
against the onslaught of omnipresent control machines.
The corporatized Internet of the early twenty-first century is a far cry
from the wide-eyed frontier of open access and unlimited interchange on
which P-Orridge premised h/er digital optimism. Accordingly, recent
confirmation of an unprecedented mass surveillance regime will likely
provoke witch house’s successor to strive to evade (or flaunt) this mon-
itoring while building a broad, international grid of artists and activists.
Other accelerating variables such as big data, robotic automation, genetic
modification, and cyborg enhancement might also play crucial roles in the
determination of future musical/magickal networks. Yet beneath the
threshold of both casual observation and state-sponsored scanning, the
tendrils of Psychic TV/TOPY’s next unholy progeny may already be in
motion on the fringes of the Internet, employing ritual—or merely the
appearance thereof—to empower (or seduce) a new community of musi-
cians, dissenters, and listeners.

Acknowledgments
I would like to gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Michael Willems, whose perspec-
tive, encouragement, and editorial insight played a significant role in the cultivation and
advancement of this project.