Start Listening To: Toria Wooff

Toria Wooff finds inspiration in folk horror, occult history and the West Pennine Moors on her second album, Aleister.

Toria Wooff’s songs have a habit of finding their way back to the moors around her Lancashire hometown, even when they venture into stranger territory. On her second album, Aleister, an interest in occult history and folk horror sits alongside writing about grief, OCD, infertility and recovery, with drones, tape saturation and vintage keyboards opening up new possibilities for her alt-folk sound. Ahead of shows that include a run of church dates, Wooff discusses writing with clearer boundaries, the crows behind ‘The Morrigan’, her parallel life as a painter and an enduring love of Alice Cooper.

For those unfamiliar with your music, can you tell us who you are, where you’re from and about the music you make?

Hello! I’m Toria Wooff and I’m from a small Lancashire town called Horwich, famous for Rivington Pike and great pasties. I would say I write alt-folk music; however, my love for goth subcultures and folk horror often results in it being dubbed ‘Gothic Folk’… Which I’m very happy to run with.

You wrote Aleister between finishing your debut and its release. What were you discovering about your songwriting while that first record was still waiting to be heard?

The writing process of each record was quite different. The track-list of my debut album changed and evolved as I wrote new songs and consequently ended up being a body of work that spanned across various phases and chapters of my writing. I’m very proud of my first record but the open-ended nature of that writing/recording process led me to wanting to make a record with more intention and boundaries from the outset. With Aleister, the writing stage was much more condensed and I wrote the songs over the course of one year with the vision of creating a cohesive body of work.

Where did the name Aleister come from, and what made it the right title for this album?

The album takes its name from infamous occultist Aleister Crowley. I’ve been fascinated with the history of the occult since my teens, likely as a direct result of my love for the likes of Sabbath and Zeppelin and how it filtered through their own lyricism and lore (Jimmy Page owned Crowley’s former home, Boleskine House).

Crowley developed a theory that every person is assigned their own ‘angel’ and he subsequently dedicated 18 months of his life, unsuccessfully, trying to contact his through an elaborate ritual in isolation (definitely a good 2am rabbit hole to dig down if you have the time). I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on my obsessive compulsions and the anger surrounding them; the title track ‘Aleister’ stemmed from the idea of meeting my own ‘angel’ and having the opportunity to confront them on why I’m the way I am. This introspective theme of reflection, and accompanying bitterness, seemed to encompass the record as a whole and we inadvertently referred to the album as Aleister from the early pre-pro sessions back in Popty.

‘The Morrigan’ grew from the idea that people hearing spirits in the woods might actually have been hearing crows imitate human voices. What was the first part of the song that came to you from that idea?

I’m a huge lover of all things paranormal but I’m also a huge sceptic; when I learned that a whole host of folklore could be put down to corvids mimicking human speech I was completely fascinated. That idea rattled around in my head and whilst messing around with the riff from one of my existing songs ‘The Flood’, I experimented with a more monotonous pattern that never really gives the listener a reprieve and came up with the repetitive chant ‘Open the circle, call the quarter’ and then the rest of the song just blossomed from there the same day. I wrote the main cello part in my head whilst writing the vocal melody. I sent a ropey voice note to my cellist, Polly Virr, and she quickly sent back some stems for us to work with. Her arrangement was perfect (as usual) and we kept those demo stems in the final record.

How did you and Light In The Tower develop the video for ‘The Morrigan’, and was there an image you were particularly determined to bring to life?

I knew I wanted the video to echo old 1970s British folk horror and visually mirror the analogue aesthetic we’d created in the production. Alex and Jake from LITT took that idea after the first video meeting and ran with it brilliantly. They researched the Morrigan legend and came back with a vibe and storyboard that allowed us to feature characters and themes whilst keeping the whole video abstract and avoiding a narrative. It’s been brilliant working with them; they’ve handled all videography across Aleister.

Before recording, you and James Wyatt spent time in a small Welsh cottage with a guitar and some microphones. Can you describe a moment there that helped you understand how the album should sound?

It’s hard to pinpoint one moment in particular. Our first stint at Popty came at a time of anxious burnout and uncertainty. A week earlier we’d returned from Americanafest over in Nashville and were a little fraught and craving something less saturated and significantly quieter. We’d also been knocked back by a label we’d been talking to for quite a while and, in hindsight, those experiences probably fuelled our desire to create something sonically different and more abstract than the textures on the first record. The cottage itself was tiny; we’d sit in the opposing armchairs barely a foot away from one another and chat about what we wanted to explore and before long the palette of Aleister had fallen into place.

The record uses drones, tape saturation and vintage keyboards alongside acoustic instruments. Was there a sound you stumbled across in the studio that changed a song completely?

We knew from the first pre-pro sessions that we wanted to explore new textures that we hadn’t tried before and to lean away from any habitual moulds we’d started to recognise retrospectively. The biggest change was on the track ‘Poor Company’; we’d originally demo’d a full band arrangement led by strummed acoustic guitar and drums and it wasn’t until experimenting on James’ piano that I realised I wanted to track it completely exposed.

You grew up on the edge of the West Pennine Moors. Is there a particular place there you keep returning to in your writing, and what does it hold for you?

Winter Hill certainly seems to be a constant source of inspiration and is referenced in ‘The Waltz of Winter Hey’, ‘Eileen’ and an unreleased track from album three called ‘Winter Hill, On Fire Again’. I’m drawn to not only the beauty of the landscape but also the emotional pull of my hometown is hard to avoid when writing.

Your songs bring personal experiences into contact with folklore and mythology. Does writing through a character or an old story let you say things you might find harder to express directly?

The songs with the hardest subject matter are the ones about my own experiences and how they’ve shaped and continue to shape me. I don’t necessarily find this difficult; however, writing through a different lens definitely allows me to write beyond my own personal experiences and draw on other narratives and themes, i.e. in ‘The Morrigan’. That said, sometimes these themes may intertwine with my own lived experiences and become metaphorical, i.e. on penultimate track ‘House On The Hill’.

Aleister touches on grief, OCD, infertility and recovery. How did you decide what you wanted to share on the record and what you wanted to keep for yourself?

At risk of sounding cliché, I very rarely decide what I’m going to write about ahead of time but it’s no secret that a lot of my writing stems from difficult personal experiences. The track-listing on both records happened naturally and was never censored, so to speak. This question has made me realise I don’t think I’ve ever written a song that I’ve later thought I actively shouldn’t share; my writing is often introspective and somewhat vulnerable but that’s just how it goes, I’d hate to write a song and then think ‘ooh I best keep that one secret’ haha.

You’re also a surrealist painter. Has a song ever started with something you painted, or a painting with something you couldn’t quite get into a song?

I never consciously think my music and my painting are entwined until I look back on a chapter of creativity and in hindsight can see that themes and imagery may have stemmed from similar places. Similar to the record’s production, the canvases I painted during the creation of Aleister notably took a darker direction and became a little more obscure and abstract. I’m not sure if that more experimental phase is down to becoming more confident in my art, exploring new ideas or perhaps the fact I stopped taking ‘pet portrait’ commissions…

Which British or Irish folk record would you play for someone to help them understand what you love about that music?

I love Jim Ghedi’s Wasteland record. I think it’s an amazing example of how folk music can be taken to new sonic places whilst retaining all the characteristics that make folk what it is and always has been. The production is incredible.

What do you love right now?

I’m particularly happy that the seasons have started to change. I love getting cosy, the BBC’s M. R. James adaptations, jam roly-polys, Uncanny, cable knitting, ghost hunts, espresso martinis and my Tom Sands Native Guitar.

What do you hate right now?

AI… Specifically AI pub posters.

Name an album you’re still listening to from when you were younger and why it’s still important to you?

Alice Cooper’s Love It To Death. I’m a huge Alice Cooper fan, specifically ’69-’78, and I think he has had a huge impact on my work despite the fact I’ve ended up as a folk artist… Although perhaps that’s where the ‘gothic’ part comes from? This album in particular has a great grit, the lyricism is dark and poetic whilst tongue-in-cheek, and performatively it gets quite theatrical at points. I had a grand plan to make sure I listened to ‘I’m Eighteen’ the second I woke up on my eighteenth birthday and I’m still absolutely floored every time I hear that riff years later.

Several of your upcoming shows are in churches. How does the room you’re playing in affect your performance, and what are you looking forward to hearing these songs do in those spaces?

It perhaps shouldn’t, but I’d be lying if I said the room doesn’t affect me. I much prefer an intimate setting where I’m close to the audience; rooms which encourage quiet and active listening. I do love playing in churches but I equally love a club gig!

Photography By: Marieke Macklon