Part 1

Name: Thomas Howard aka Orchid Mantis

Nationality: American
Occupation: Singer, songwriter, producer
Current Release: Orchid Mantis's new album In Airports is out now.

If you enjoyed this Orchid Mantis interview and would like to stay up to date with his music, visit his official homepage. He is also on Instagram, Soundcloud, Facebook, and bandcamp.



Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

I don’t know why I create, I only know it comes from a very deep place. I know this because I felt it from an early age, 12 or 13, when I started interfacing with art as something that wasn't just outside of me, but something I could also be a part of.

My first love was photography, I borrowed my parents DSLR and mimicked the macro photography on photosharing websites. But music captured my heart entirely, when I learned to write and record. I taught myself guitar to play music with my friends in high school, but found true joy in making music alone, learning what the blank canvas of a DAW meant, that endless potential for creativity.

I'm driven by the knowledge that I could work in Ableton for a lifetime and still only scratch the surface of what's possible. I'm driven by the desire to turn fleeting ideas in the mind into concrete and permanent records, to make music as a diary and a challenge for myself, to get closer and closer to pure communication of my internal world. To turn my soul into a song.

I can't say what inspires me, because I really find everything inspiring - the people around me, the places I go, the art I consume, I experience it all as a call to action, to say something back.

Sometimes I wish I could consume art passively, but ever since that early age I've never been able to just enjoy things - my art is certainly narcissistic that way, I hear a song or play a game and think "What is my version of that? What if I did that? What does this inspire in me?" I can't turn it off, even if I wanted to, if I spend any significant length of time outside of the creative world, the everyday world starts to feel suffocating and pointless.

For you to get started, do there need to be concrete ideas – or what some have called a 'visualisation' of the finished work? What does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?

I have ideas, or influences, and it varies a lot.

Sometimes I genuinely sit down and just play, explore sound and arrive at something hopefully interesting. Very often it's like that, and often my favorite work! I like to record at the same time I'm writing, so that the thing that happens is pure rather than influenced by a prior expectation or vision.

But other times I do have a clear visualization, a genre or sound I'm interested in, it's just that I find that more exciting when it's vague and impossible.

Like, lately I've been recording with the vision of "Let's create the most beautiful sound" and I love that, because it doesn't have too many implications or boundaries, just "beauty" - whatever that means. If I think, "Let's make a jangly indie pop song" I get stuck very fast, because I'm not uniquely equipped to make that, I'm not the master of that sound.

So I like to treat it like fishing, where I have a simple goal in mind and just keep casting my line until I catch something that feels exciting.

Is there a preparation phase for your process? Do you require your tools to be laid out in a particular way, for example, do you need to do 'research' or create 'early versions'?

I don't think I iterate or make demos the way I hear other musicians do. It comes back to my process of writing and recording simultaneously. I've never booked studio time or worked with engineers, so whatever I record will form at least the skeleton of the finished song. The demo, with time, becomes the final recording.

I don't think there's any preparation involved, and I'm super flexible about my tools. I've never had a stable "studio" environment, and have gone through phases of having my own space, a drumkit, amps, mics, etc. - or years of having none of that at all, just a laptop and my guitar. That said, for a final recording, I need to have access to my DAW and preferably my four-track cassette recorder, so something can always be filtered through tape.

I value the opportunity, somewhere in my process, to leave that sterile digital space of my laptop and make sure a component of the song has been filtered through analog - for me, it needs to have existed in physical form, not just digital code.

Do you have certain rituals to get you into the right mindset for creating? What role do certain foods or stimulants like coffee, lighting, scents, exercise or reading poetry play?

I really love the idea of that, but I don't think so! I love the involvement of ritual in art. Adrienne Lenker said something I think about how she meditates for some time before she composes, and I've played around with "focusing" exercises like that but never stuck with it.

But you're really talking about external factors, right? So in that sense of the question, the only thing it feels like I'm truly reliant on is momentum.

That is, even when I've taken a short break, and don't feel like I have that "mindset" in the moment to be creative, to just force myself anyways. Which doesn't feel great at the time, but something happens the next day, where that failure makes me want to try again. Or my success yesterday, some idea I developed, gets me into the studio again.

You need to have an unbroken flow, day to day. And when you lose it, you painstakingly reclaim that. If you look away from the canvas for too long, you start to forget what you were doing, and have to remember again. So rituals and focus are less of a preparatory, daily thing, and more of an ongoing state I have to maintain, if that makes sense.

The last thing I'll say is that, like a lot of creators, I do think I make my best work when I have something happening in my life that I need to talk about, but I'm less of an "expressive" artist than I am an "exploratory" one: I'm plenty inspired by sound and texture alone, emotion is present in my music but my primary motivator is pure artistic play.

So in a sense, I can write without having anything to write about, because the exciting thing is the sound for me, following new musical ideas wherever they lead. And I've never run out of musical ideas.

For In Airports, what did you start with? If there were conceptual considerations, what were they?

Actually, this album is the first thing I've made in a while that didn't have any goal in mind, something purely explorative like my older work.

I made I Only Remember The Good Parts inspired directly by this new boom of 2020s lo-fi slowcore, wanting to create my own impression of it.



And I did the same with Possession Pact, coming at it from a specific angle of wanting to strip my music down to emotion and guitar, quiet music inspired by Low and Bedhead.



But I didn't do that pre-2017! Of course I had influences, but I worked entirely on instinct, building on a guitar pattern or sample in whatever procedural way that felt natural. To make this album, In Airports, I sort of had to unlearn a lot of formulas I'd internalized, stop thinking "this is meant to sound like X band" and instead get back in touch with my own instincts.

I had been working non-stop on this idea of the "most hi-fi professional Orchid Mantis album" that referenced all these specific band touchstones, and it just wasn't working. It never felt right until I re-learned to just trust my own process and record from a pure instinctive place, rather than a derivative place.

Too much influence can prevent you from simply pulling out whatever exists in your mind, without compromise or filtration.

What makes lyrics good in your opinion? What are your own ambitions and challenges in this regard?

Good lyrics are different from prose. They don't have to make sense, because they're a component of the music! They don't have to stand alone. They're one piece of the puzzle of the song, so the first and most important thing is whether they suit the song.

I don't think lyrics even have to be necessarily communicative, there's no easy rule for what's good or not. But if a certain moment in a song cuts deeper due to what is being said, then the lyrics are good. That's what I look for, those moments.

I struggled early on to meet the syllabic constraints of my melodies, to communicate within rhyme schemes and form. I knew what I wanted to express, and could write it down, but not in lyrics. The breakthrough I found that I've leaned on ever since is I write compulsively in semi-prose reflecting on whatever is on my mind moment-to-moment, then when writing/recording I'll pull from that diary and transform the prose line by line into something that fits the melody I've written.

I generally have the melody before I have the lyrics, so it has to be that way. I'm very jealous of people who write the opposite way, constructing a melody around their writing.

What are areas/themes/topics that you keep returning to in your lyrics?

Memory and time.

I know my recollection of things that have happened to me will get blurrier with time (I have a very poor memory in the first place), so when I do write from personal experience I like to treat my lyrics like a diary entry. To preserve how I'm feeling or what I'm experiencing and give myself a permanent record of that time.

I hate this idea, that with time places and people will come and go from my life, and that my memory of them will fade. Because I'm pushing back against that process by writing music, in a sort of meta way that fear becomes a topic of the lyrics themselves.

The most clearcut instance of that theme is my song "Reoccurring." But it's everywhere, in practically every song.



I don't have a strong belief in personal identity, I really think we are different people day to day, let alone year to year. I don't know what really, truly, connects me to the person I was five years ago. But in some very real way I do feel that "I" am the author of all my songs, even the ones I wrote when I was a teenager.

Another thing I’m always doing in my songs is directly questioning what this world is, asking why. This central question of whether the events of our lives happen due to fate and purpose, or happen arbitrarily without any deeper meaning.

My album Visitations is an at-the-time heartfelt conviction of the former, …



... and the following album How Long Will It Take is a direct negative response after that conviction was broken, an attempt to argue it is okay if there is no meaning. That the world is still beautiful anyways.



My catalogue is often a pendulum swinging between those two extremes, an ongoing argument in my head on whether the universe is, or is not, apathetic to us.

More than any other artist, I've probably been most lyrically influenced by Phil Elverum, and how he walks this line between mundane accounts of his life experiences and world-encompassing sweeping metaphor. He makes an argument, in his discography, that they are the same. Planets and mountains and endless oceans are the language with which he'll describe something as routine as sitting on the porch drinking coffee.



At the end of his album Microphones In 2020 he claims "anyway every song I’ve ever sung is about the same thing / standing on the ground looking around, basically" and I really do relate to that.