The Darkest Of The Hillside Thickets: An Interview With Toren Atkinson

Popshifter: Is the band doing anything music-wise these days? I know you appear at a few events every now and then.

Toren Atkinson: We are slowly making our way towards another album. I’ve got a lot of other projects on the go, personally, so I haven’t been going to practice as often as I should be. But we definitely have a plan to do another album, and in the meantime we’re doing the occasional show and we’re going to be doing—last year we did Cthulhupalooza, which was basically an event that myself and a few of my friends [put on]. We now refer to ourselves as Second Level Wizards Awesome Events Society. We got our track on Rock Band last year and decided to have a Rock Band contest/Thickets concert/HP Lovecraft film festival. And that was an interesting experience.

For that one, we, because it was at a movie theater, finally realized my dream of having a bunch of random shit projected while we played. So our costumes were pretty much all white and we had big puzzle piece helmets. We projected things that I had been collecting off of TV since the days before DVD. So atomic bombs going off, cuttlefish mating, various tentacles, and the monsters scenes from Forbidden Planet—all these cool, weird, nerdy, science-y type stuff that we projected onto us and the screen behind us while we were playing our show. It was really great and it was successful enough that we’re going to do it again this year. That’s coming up in December in Vancouver.

Popshifter: That’s awesome! So talking about costumes, how many different costumes have you had over the years? And Part B to that question: Are your outfits always complementary to one another?

Toren Atkinson: Not necessarily, no. I don’t have a number for you for how many iterations of costumes there have been. We started out just kind of having Lovecraftian costumes and once in a while we would get bored with that and try to come up with a theme. We had a Star Wars theme for a while where our bass player basically had the Wedge Antilles X-Wing Pilot outfit and I wore a helmet that was basically a TIE Fighter and stuff like that. Then we had another theme where it was Spider-Man villains where I was Dr. Octopus and Bob the bass player was Electro; we had The Rhino and The Lizard. That was a lot of fun.

But generally, it’s kind of been just random shit because we find that the best way to get costumes done is if each individual person has something they’re excited about. So we’d never say no if the person was going to make their own costume because that’s the only way that they’re going to get done. (laughs). So a lot of the time we had just random, non-related costumes. Usually they’re monster- or Lovecraft-related but not necessarily all the time.

Photo from thickets.net

Popshifter: How much time is spent planning the outfits versus band practice?

Toren Atkinson: In the early days we spent a lot of time crafting our own costumes and in the early days they were more extravagant in some ways than more recent costumes. Basically since our Spaceship Zero album, we’ve kind of scaled back and tried to make costumes a little more practical because we would find in the early days that our long wigs would get caught in bass strings and papier-mâché spikes on legs might interfere with the pedals and whatnot. (laughs). So it’s always been a balance of having very impressive and grotesque finery and at the same time be able to play the songs the way people would like us to play the songs.

Click to read more about. . .

New music and number of costumes
Wardrobe malfunctions
DVDs and PAX
Rock Band
Halloween

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