It was in July 2013 that I first came across Hibernal, when I received a message through ProgArchives saying that someone called Mark Healy had read some of my reviews and wondered if I was interested in his debut release under that name? As I have always endeavoured to increase my musical awareness I said “Yes”, and in due course a Bandcamp code was sent to me and I downloaded the album, called ‘The Machine’. Instead of starting with music, this commenced with spoken words and sound effects, and within the first minute I was enthralled and the real world had fallen away: I was already deep inside the world of Hibernal. This is not a concept album in the normal sense, neither is it a story with some music in the background, rather this is a genuinely new and exciting art form where music and actors combine to create a short film for your ears.
Fast forward to 2017 and Hibernal has released their fourth album, ‘The Dark of The City’, so now seemed the right time to sit back and have a chat.
Kevin Rowland: What inspires you musically?
Mark Healy: In terms of music, I pick up inspiration from all over the place. I first took up guitar because I wanted to play Tool songs, so Adam Jones has obviously been very influential in my songwriting.
I'm also a huge fan of stoner rock bands like Kyuss and Monster Magnet. In terms of more contemporary Prog, I like Karnivool and Porcupine Tree, and I especially love the way Steven Wilson constructs his longer tracks like 'Arriving Somewhere'. That's the kind of song that takes you on a journey as a listener, which is what I try to do with my own albums.
The stuff I write for Hibernal tends to gravitate toward atmospherics and soundscapes, so I also take inspiration from post rock bands like Hammock and Cloudkicker as well.
I was also into lots of industrial music in the 90s, with bands like Ministry, Front Line Assembly, NIN and KMFDM constantly blaring from my car stereo. I had a pretty decent mullet at the time and I undoubtedly looked cool hooning around in my beat-up Toyota Corolla. With industrial, I loved the blend of harsh guitars, electronic elements and vocal sampling. In fact, the prototype Hibernal song I developed back in 2012 used vocal samples to create a very rudimentary kind of narrative, but I found that searching for the right samples was very time consuming and ultimately limited the scope of what I could do. That's when I came up with the idea of using my own story, told via voice actors, rather than samples from other sources.
What inspires you in literature?
Some of my favourite authors include Arthur C. Clarke, Neal Stephenson, Stephen King and George RR Martin. Clarke and Stephenson are both masters of detail; they create such vivid realities with their writing that it feels like you are reading documented accounts of things that happened. I've learned in my own writing that filling the world with detail certainly lends authenticity to the experience for the reader, so I plan my speculative universes for months in advance before putting pen to paper. Or fingers to keyboard as it is these days.
Oddly enough, my writing has also been inspired by music many times. One example is the short story that formed the basis for the album 'The Machine'. This entire story came to me one night driving in my car listening to Pink Floyd's 'Welcome to the Machine'. I still remember the throbbing bassline at the start of the track inspiring the notion of the 'sickly heartbeat' heard by the narrator when he first confronts the device in the bowels of the Machine Co. building.
It was a freaky, scary, and awesome experience, the kind of thing only great music can evoke. This is what I try to emulate with Hibernal.
Are you a writer who can play music, or a musician who can write books?
I'm definitely a writer who plays a bit of music on the side! In fact, I'm a bit of a bedroom guitarist to be honest. I took up guitar late in life and never had lessons. I'm more of a storyteller and someone who creates moods and atmospheres, and luckily for me that's a good skillset for a project like Hibernal. I play to my strengths and don't try to be something I'm not. I think that understanding your limitations is a huge part of being successful as an artist, and I certainly know mine!
What made you decide on this type of art form?
I had been wanting to put a band together for several years. I wrote about fifty songs (lyrics and music) over the course of three or four years and tried to recruit band members, but there was no chemistry with the people I was jamming with.
My singing is total garbage, so doing the album solo was out of the question. I considered arranging the songs as instrumentals, but in truth I wanted to do something that was more compelling and which allowed me to captivate the listener (which I didn’t think I could do with music alone).
As I mentioned above, I messed around with using samples from movies in my songs to heighten the experience and I was immediately struck by the power of those simple additions. I got some chills happening for sure. However, apart from the time-consuming nature of finding samples, I was worried about the legality of ‘stealing’ them from movies so I scrapped the idea.
At that point I was ready to give it all up, as it seemed as though I was out of options. Then I remembered the short story I’d written a decade before called ‘Welcome to the Machine’. It had been selected to appear in an anthology with some big-name authors - all very exciting for a young author like myself - but after working on edits for months, the anthology was cancelled at the last minute and nothing was published. (This also caused me to give up writing in disgust at the time, since it all seemed like a big waste of time).
But those chills, man. I wanted to experience that creative buzz again. I kept messing around with the format, and soon realised that I could adapt the story into a simple, condensed script and set it to the music I’d written, and that would allow me to make a concept album with narration instead of song lyrics. To be honest, the idea was a bit ridiculous - combining a spoken word piece with instrumentals - but when I started to play around with it I had a lot of fun. I told myself that it would be a good exercise in writing, recording, mixing and mastering an album, so I kept going with it. I matched songs I’d written with different scenes from the script, and composed more music from scratch where nothing fit.
The decision to hire professional voice talent wasn't an easy one. When I checked it out I found it to be quite expensive, but I decided that if I was going to make the album and put my name on it, I’d do it with the highest production values possible.
So, I released ‘The Machine’ on Bandcamp and told a few friends about it, looking for feedback on the audio quality and any other general thoughts. I waited, and waited, and there was deafening silence. I could almost picture them sitting there scratching their heads as they tried to figure out what the hell I'd created. It was about that time I went searching for a very large hole to crawl into.
I was too embarrassed to send the album out to any bloggers or reviewers because I thought they’d find it ridiculous. Then, about a week after release, complete strangers started to pay money for the album even though it was listed for free on Bandcamp. They messaged me wanting to know if I was going to make more albums. It was only at that point I realised Hibernal might have some appeal for a small fan base.
So, Hibernal wasn’t something I planned, but rather something that came about through experimentation and trial and error.
You’ve released instrumental versions of the first three albums – do you personally prefer these or the ones containing the stories?
I've only ever made the instrumental albums for the fans. (I have awesome fans, by the way, so it was the least I could do.) Initially I had no interest in doing the instrumentals at all, but I finally caved after receiving so many requests from fans for the 'narration-free' versions. I've never written a song with the intention of it ending up as an instrumental. Even the songs I wrote in the early days before Hibernal had accompanying lyrics. I do enjoy listening to instrumentals by other artists, but when it comes to my own creations, I seem to have a driving need for a theme to be included in there somewhere.
The future per Hibernal is bleak, and not a lot of room for humanity. Do you see each of the albums as different facets of the same future, or are they alternative realities?
Guilty as charged, I do write some bleak stuff! I have always used art as a kind of catharsis, dealing with my fears by writing them down in the form of a story. 'The Machine' is a perfect example. When I wrote it, I was at the point in my career where I was beginning to worry that I was spending too much time at work. Then, bam! This story falls out of my head about a man who surrenders every part of himself to his job. Coincidence? Probably not!
After the Winter - while ostensibly about nuclear war, synthetics, and the end of the world - is just a story about a man struggling for self-acceptance. Almost all my stories are just tools for examining the things we all grapple with in our day-to-day lives.
In terms of continuity, the albums could be loosely considered to be set in the same universe, especially the first three. When I wrote 'The Dark of the City', however, I considered it to be a clean slate, because I didn't want to have to conform to previous timelines and events. There are still some commonalities between the stories simply because I tend to revisit certain themes, and if you connect enough dots you could say that it's still the same universe, but it's not necessarily something I've done intentionally.
Have you ever felt that you ought to go back to any of the stories and provide a sequel?
I get asked to do sequels a LOT. I had people asking me to write sequels right from the first album. I suppose the reason I haven't is because I view the albums as an exploration of a single idea, and once that's done, I'm ready to move on to another idea. Plus, I don't like treading over old ground. I try to make each album sound and feel different from the last, and I'm not sure I could effectively do that with continuing storylines and characters.
Having said that, I wouldn't completely close the door on the concept of an album sequel. If I came up with a killer idea for a continuing storyline that was fresh and interesting, I would go ahead with it.
Each of the stories is compelling and complete yet it is incredibly hard to write a short story that is complete in every way – how do approach this?
Writing a story for an album is very challenging. In fact, at times it's a total pain.
First, I set myself a limit of 2500 words. If it blows out more than that, the ratio of narration to music gets too high and it starts to feel like an audiobook with a bit of music on the side. So, within that very small amount of real estate there's many tasks that need to be accomplished: describe the world and the setting; create character arcs; have plot and resolution; tackle themes that lie at the core of the story.
That's a lot to do in a short amount of time. For that reason, I rely on archetypes quite heavily. For example, in an early draft of 'Replacements', the main character Artimus was working in a spare parts store and explaining the social structure of the world through people who came into the store, as well as revealing his own backstory, but it took me six tracks to get to the plot. It just wouldn't have worked on an album because I'd have lost the interest of the listener by that point. So, I ditched that setup in favour of an introductory track that gave a brief outline, followed by a whole bunch of cyberpunk tropes - synthetics, rain, shuttles flying overhead, and the overall film noir mood. That saved me spending 2000 words establishing the world, and instead allowed me to get straight into the plot.
Likewise, there's no time to create complex characters. The version of Artimus that ends up in the final script has very little backstory. He's a loner who restlessly wanders the streets looking for meaning. That's it. And I think that works well because it creates a sense of mystery about him. The audience is given a few crumbs about his outlook on the world and his motivations, and the rest is a blank canvas for them to fill in.
I think I cranked out close to fifty drafts of ‘Replacements’ over a three-month period before I got something that ticked all the boxes that need to be ticked. It's an iterative process and it just takes a lot of time and patience to find the right balance.
What comes first, the story or the music?
For the first album, I developed the story and the music separately, thinking the two would never end up together. After the idea for Hibernal hit me, I adapted the 6500-word short story into a 2500-word script and broke it up into eleven scenes. Then I went through the catalogue of songs I'd written looking to see if any of them fit the mood for each individual scene. Lucky, some of them did. I had to write an additional 20% of new music for the scenes I couldn't match.
After that first album, I had a better idea of what I was doing, and I developed the script and the music together. I would come up with a story idea in my head and write some music that I thought might accompany it, and once I had a few decent songs together I would flesh out the script and start the drafting process. It was a lot more organic. On the first album, most of the narration and dialog happen between the sections of music, often between songs in short segues. On the subsequent albums, it's far more integrated, with narration and dialog happening during songs, almost like lyrics. It was a conscious choice to compose music that could more effectively accommodate the story in a more fluid fashion.
Why change to a female first person in TDotC?
I must give credit to my collaborator Rowan Salt for this one. I had originally written the script with a male in the lead role, and it was his idea to try it the other way around. As Rowan suggested, there's an interesting dynamic when the female partner is in control. Also, I already had Faleena Hopkins (from previous Hibernal productions) lined up to appear on the album, and we wanted to give her a larger role and really 'stretch her wings' so to speak. She didn't disappoint.
Another reason why I jumped at the idea was because it was another way to differentiate TDotC from previous albums. As I said earlier, I like each album to have its own feel. For TDotC, I shortened the length of the album considerably and wrote the script in present tense, which is something I hadn't done before. Making the lead character a female was another great way to give the album a unique feel in the Hibernal catalogue.
What’s next?
I'm currently putting the finishing touches on the instrumental version of The Dark of the City. That one should be coming to an internet near you some time in the next few weeks. After that, I'm going to spend some time concentrating on my writing. I plan to publish at least three more novels this year as I continue my march toward world domination.
After that, things get a bit nebulous. I'll confess that I haven't written a single track for another Hibernal album, and although I've tinkered with a few scripts, I haven't come up with anything I'm happy with. I've also toyed with the idea of creating a podcast that features one story over five or ten episodes - like a radio play type deal - but I don't think that will happen.
Most likely I'll blow the cobwebs off my guitar at some point soon and see what comes out. Whether that's a Hibernal album or something else, I don’t know. I'll just see where the creative juices take me.
I strongly believe that Mark has released some of the most compelling albums I have heard over the last four years. They should come with a government health warning as it is just not advisable to drive when playing these; reality disappears and the bleak science fiction world of the future and the stories of those involved are the only things that matter. All the albums are easily available through Bandcamp, https://hibernal.bandcamp.com/music
