Perhaps his most expansive conception yet, Werewolves in Love is the latest offering from the enigmatic and revered Spencer Clark. The project is multi-modally composed of DVD footage of landscapes, a dense and expansive book of transformative paradigms. All of this, over a soundtrack, comprised of Clark’s most evocative soundscapes to date.

listencorp writers, Satchit Prabhu and Nick Caceres, sat down with Spencer Clark to inquire about his new mind-revitalising project, with in-depth discussions of literary inspirations, metaphysical frameworks, and what’s next in line for the ever-growing body of dreams.

Nick (N): Let’s start with the book. When Satchit and I first read through this tale, we were whiplashed by a dense plot that very much fits your music like a mold, defying conventional linear progression with constantly shifting perspectives. How did you go about piecing it together?

Spencer (SP): Most records I make arrive to me somewhat timely in my dreams before I start recording. It just works that way now more than ever. I think after I made Pinhead In Fantasia, and buried a special cassette copy of it behind the organ theatre in Balboa Park, San Diego (a place where I go in my dreams often), that the dream communication set in its place to work.

But Werewolves in Love’s first vision hit me while I was on my mother-in-law’s couch in San Diego. I had a huge toothache, and she gave me this special powder that I put inside my tooth. The pain almost left instantly; it was almost like morphine, and then my body sank into the cushions and I saw with my eyes open a hill with a werewolf flying over it in the sky.

One month later, I arrived in Greece and went to a place called Filopappou Hill, I instantly realised that my vision was made to be placed there. So I returned to what I call the hill of dreams (referencing Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams) and began to let the story come to me. I had never written a book before, so I wasn’t sure how to fill out the story of my visions, but I had been reading Goethe, and his remarking about exact sensorial fantasy, about studying a plant, and rather than sketching its development out with a pencil, he let his imagination memorise it and then let the flowering of the plant animate in his mind. I felt that for the story to be real, it would have to animate in my mind like that. And so, I think the plot of the book is constantly a flowering of energy.

The sigils and symbols that I use in Werewolves in Love I made based on an equation that I developed that to me would cause a new flowering on earth that could be a more intimate conversation between nature and human. As I was writing the story, I then went to the hill with a VHS camera and filmed shots that made me think of the book, it also helped inform the book, like evidence that I could reference

Satchit (SA): Your fascination with the dream world has a palpable presence throughout your discography, and in Werewolves in Love, I feel it taps into this “crossing or erasure of boundaries” in a particularly strong and transportative way.

SP: The story is a constant building up and flowering on a few different planes, and it is important for me to show how the characters are not the main focus, they are cosmic instruments flowering. They can all constantly change with the environment or stop to exist in the story, but the energy that they have attracted, which is a spell, runs at its own pace.

SA: There is a definite centrality when it comes to symbols, sigils, and diagrams in your novella. How much of this album revolves around this exploration or exploitation of archetypes and archetypal imagery in the collective unconscious to further cement the sound-image into the listener’s mind?

SP: The sigils and symbols that I use in Werewolves in Love I made based on an equation that I developed that to me would cause a new flowering on earth that could be a more intimate conversation between nature and human. As I was writing the story, I then went to the hill with a VHS camera and filmed shots that made me think of the book, it also helped inform the book, like evidence that I could reference. I remember watching Communion, the UFO movie with Christopher Walken, and he is working on his novel and fleshing out ideas by filming himself in a room and interviewing his characters. The music is a soundtrack to the video footage, but intact in the video footage is the story, Werewolves in Love

N: Is the proto-modern practice of alchemy something that was heavy on your mind when constructing the project? If so, for what intention?

SP: I think people are at all times involved in a spell, or have triggered a spell. And I think all people are naturally initiated into a form of thinking or being that is transmutation, whether they like it or not. It can’t be that acting magically is so foreign to us all. There is no secret room for the special souls that you have only read about it, where they get to live transcendantly and everyone else does not. Old magic and new magic might exist historically, and 70s music and 80s music might exist this way also, but for me time is crunched, and it all flows together, And the natural will of reflection of life is happening.

SA: Werewolves in Love contains perhaps your only foray into film as media, something I feel a lot of your work implicitly does where the music is the image by creating its own cinematic field, with scenes that assemble differently to every individual listener. For a long spanning discography that has so many albums with narratives that we could only speculate about, why is now the moment you’ve chosen to lay the architecture out bare?

SP: Living in Greece the vibe is strong. If you have developed a mental acuity for thinking in spiritual or occult waves, aspects that you were reaching for in different locales might just arrive to you here without any effort on your part, meaning the place is charged hardcore. And it is, there is really no disputing that for me. The port of Athens is a view to Africa and Egypt, and in reverse their magic, that created the renaissance in Italy, flows up through Athens, Greece. So I feel I’m staring at a migration coming towards me and flowing through me on its way as it spreads into the world. the fact that the renaissance and the magic of that happened some time ago is like I have already said irrelevant to me, things become alive when you decide to feel them. There is no time zone to the depths.

N: Speaking of cinematic tone, this is not your first rodeo in creating visual media. I’m really curious about your hand in Diminishing Shrine Recycles, when you and James Ferraro were The Skaters. Is there a similar relationship at play with the tracks and content at hand in that project?

SP: That is a movie made by James. The DVD in this Werewolves in Love package, is like location footage, it stands as one ingredient that one would have to make a movie. As Werewolves in Love is a hidden energy waiting to be let out, so the physical package of the three ingredients of the music, book, and DVD, are all ingredients that together can be activated to unveil whatever hidden energy it is in your mind.

SA: The lord of Exterior Perception, Flight, Morphology, and Air are central figures mentioned here in your novella, and in some passages we read of the werewolf’s symbol as drawings in the air, it again invokes a sort of “diagram as summoning” in the same vein as how a yantra functions. What is the metaphysical invocation that’s going on here, and what do each of these visuals bring forth to you?

SP: The sigils are a series of symbols that are an equation; the lords are beings of the essence they stand for. Like saints, what they represent. As the transference of a saint through time is sort of an historical equation of what has transpired on earth, and in the pyramids in Egypt, they are a historical representation of what has occurred cosmically. The sigils are flown in the sky and that vivifies their potent activity

SA: The novella describes the Were-being activating presences that were always latent, beings it recognised through its work. Were there any particular artists or musicians who functioned that way for you while making this project?

SP: In the first book I think a writer accumulates a lot of their life at once. But the core of the message comes from understanding that has come from just living, that being initiated into the activities of the universe is a birthright, not an academic key given to you for your endless reading and regurgitating.

I in no way want to offend people who study in institutions whatsoever. But it must always be clear that the act of living in whatever means you live has equal worth for all.

I think that once your work is published, it’s like bumming someone a cig, it’s theirs now, do what they want with it. You can throw it in the trash or smoke that

SA: Antigone, Leander, and the hill of the nymphs. All of these are borrowed from a Greek setting, but are detached from their mythos. Is there something from the original myths that is encrypted here rather than abandoned?

SP: The name Leander means lion, and the name Antigone in some ways refers to mediator, so their names in themselves are an equation that is similar to the one that creates the new flowering of earth in Werewolves in Love.

The area in which the characters find themselves, the hill of nymphs, where they activate a spell unknown to themselves, is the dome of the spell, the layer in which the spell flowers. Its the epicenter. The activity of the novel is a never-ending flowering that is not really based on any other real life myth in Greece or elsewhere, rather it is a continuing of the force of the Temple Of Isis that originated in Africa and is and has been alive afterwards. Here in this location, stronger due to all the people who came here as slaves who prayed to Isis.

When I came here it was to mix a previous album called Neoplatonic Aquatic Symposiums, that album was about a philosophy created long ago, yet when I came here I felt it important to come here and make music about how things are feeling now. and that is what has happened, when you go to a museum to see the old artifacts here, you see so directly their meaning, and the magic rather than become more mystical, takes on a real tool-like meaning and you see that magic happens in front of your eyes, actually practiced.

So again, I find myself being stripped of the onlookers’ vibe, and I feel sort of in the middle of something. And I’m not saying I feel alive in an old world of Egyptian magic, because that is sort of an onlooker’s opinion. Here you can go into the museum, or across the street there is an empty lot that has not been declared an archaeological spot, there you can be also. And so you learn first-hand the land is charged, and in my story, I charge it further. We charge.

N: In your own repertoire, were there any previous albums you put out in which you wanted to explore certain concepts differently, as you have done with Werewolves in Love?

SP: I think that once your work is published, it’s like bumming someone a cig, it’s theirs now, do what they want with it. You can throw it in the trash or smoke that. But for certain even after a long album there is something left undiscovered, a leakage. But in this case, Werewolves in Love stands as something outside of time. Outside of me, it just is itself.

N: With that, I was really curious about this repetitious warping drone that changes in tonality throughout Animating the Stranger, relapsing on Lord of Exterior Perceptions Passage of Decay. Moments like that really pulled me into the world that the novel develops.

How does this returning affectation disseminate the sprouting grip of the entity known as “the stranger”?

SP: The Stranger is a daemon, like a connecting being between the universal being and human. The warping drone is the wave of change. When the were-being animates the stranger, a wave of change and progression to the flowering is felt.

And in the lord of exterior passage of decay, the were-being is overlooking the valley and recognising the force that is the lord of exterior perception as a friend, as a companion, and as he recognises this, it makes him lonely. But the were-beings loneliness will decay, as its emotions and feelings are properties of the world, not of itself, and it is through the were-being that we can notice this in ourselves, that our emotions and feelings are properties of an outside world that we are connected to. This is the wave of connectedness.

N: Perhaps the most cinematic and rightfully so, to me, is the title track, Werewolves in Love, overlooking and panning across the slowly shifting terrain in places like the valley of nymphs. Is it meant to accompany such perspectives?

SP: The theme encapsulates the feeling of being on the Filapaou Hill, alone and in thought, and in the recognition of being alone, the feeling of the universe then engaging you when you have felt that feeling strong enough for it to become a being. I want the book and the music to reflect my feelings of being on Filapaou hill, and for that seemingly simple hill and valley to be shown as a satellite for a myriad of reflected knowledge and interaction that is magic. and the spark of the gift of realising your alive and the spark of genesis when an epiphany happens in your mind. If the listener travels to filapapou hill and listens to the music, it can be a window into that genesis of life.

N: With everything we’ve discussed about this project, does this novella conceal the secrets of the perspective we hear in your music?

SP: It may be true, but as I am in the act of living I sometimes cannot reflect and be thoughtful on my own series of reflections (albums) as one thing I cherish most in this process, that I am allowed to be engaged in the mystery of a being permitted to play in the fields of consciousness.

N: Are you hoping to foray more into multimedia projects? Is there a particular mode you’re wanting to press more into or are you satisfied with continuing down the music route?

SP: My next album is called SANDSTORMS. It comes in a magazine style, like Fourth World Magazine, and is a long poem about being stranded in a place without memory of where you’re from.

The art in the magazine is by Amy Roselynne Faust and myself together and reflects again a series of spells or activities that bring the ability to return home.

That album leads into the next one after that, which is not even recorded, which will again be a book, but a longer one than Werewolves in Love, that is called Warlock Eyes. This one is literally a whole dream I had that was basically just a transmission of the new book. The dream was literally me living the whole book. Now I don’t even have to make anything up. We’re just riding now.

N: Thanks for stopping by Listencorp; safe journeys Spence!