Transmission 219: Interview with Steve von Till

Steve Von Till is an American musician, writer, and educator. He is a member of Neurosis, which he joined in the late 1980s during the expansion of the West Coast hardcore and DIY scenes. Alongside his work in the band, he has developed two parallel solo projects: under his own name, focusing on atmospheric songwriting with an emphasis on personal reflection and environmental disconnection, and as Harvestman, a project rooted in instrumental experimentation, drones, and psychedelic textures drawn from European folk and post-industrial influences.

Title: Alone in a World of Wounds
Artist: Harvestman Steve von Till
Release Date: 2025-05-16
Genres: Americana, Experimental Music, Folk Rock
Label: Neurot Recordings
Description: Steve Von Till speaks about Alone in a World of Wounds, punk roots, ambient folk, and ecological grief in this in-depth interview.

He began recording lo-fi acoustic sketches on cassette in the late 1990s and released his first solo album in 2000. His seventh solo album, Alone in a World of Wounds, was released on 16 May 2025 by Neurot Recordings. Von Till is also a published poet, and a long-time elementary school teacher.

What made you feel ready to start creating music yourself?

My parents listened to a lot of music when I was growing up. They had a nice-sounding stereo, and I was always intrigued with sound and the quality of sound, even if it was music I wouldn’t have chosen for myself. It was hearing interesting sonic things on recordings, noticing phase effects, flanger effects, stereo image. I was really hooked at an early age. There’s pictures of me as a really small toddler with headphones on, really getting into it. As soon as I was old enough to start hearing my own music, I got really obsessed with FM radio in the United States, which had a lot of—I didn’t learn this until I was older, but I guess a lot of other countries didn’t quite have the same type of radio we had in the 70s, where we had full rock and roll radio, playing hard rock and playing entire cuts, not editing them down to two and a half minutes or whatever, but really playing even entire album sides. It was kind of a free format. And I really fell in love with all of that. I got a cassette recorder and I would record my favorite songs until I was old enough to start buying my own records. Early on, it was Jimi Hendrix and Deep Purple and Kiss, because they had the makeup.

The music didn’t make a lasting impression or influence me, but just the idea of rock and roll—I just loved it. I loved everything about it, the way it made me feel. I listened to the most extreme I could find, given whatever my age was, discovered punk rock as a teenager, which changed my life. Because when it was all these big arena rock bands like AC/DC or things like that, it seemed untouchable. Like there’s no way you can do that. That’s like superhero shit. But punk rock made me feel like I didn’t have to be the best guitarist, I didn’t have to be the best singer. I just needed to express myself. Growing up in the 80s on the West Coast, in the San Francisco Bay Area, we had a great DIY music scene. We weren’t part of any commercial scene. We weren’t part of the mainstream. We had to put on our own shows. We had to make up our own venues. We had to start our own record labels. We had to make our own fanzines. It was creating culture. And I dove into every aspect of that and haven’t stopped ever since. I’ve obviously evolved quite a bit musically since a teenager, but it’s with the same passion and the same ethics and the same ideals of: we do it because we love it. And this is a life.

Before joining Neurosis, what kinds of sounds or ideas were you chasing? How did you come to be part of the band?

I was already playing in bands that were doing a kind of crossover, mixing aspects of heavy guitar metal, thrash, hardcore—angry teenager music. Screaming at the world, screaming against injustice, screaming into the void as young boys, really. And I loved Neurosis already; they were one of my favorite local bands, because they reminded me of some English bands I liked, like Subhumans or Discharge, in their sound. There was also something psychedelic, which hadn’t really come out musically yet—you could just tell it was there, as a seed.

When the opportunity came—I was friends with Dave, the bass player, we hung out a lot. I lived an hour south, and he lived up in Berkeley, where all the shows were happening. I would stay at his house on weekends so I could go to more shows. We talked about music all the time. When the opportunity came to join Neurosis, it was perfect, because I was heading in a direction that offered something to them, and they were heading in a direction that offered something to me. And we grew together into what would eventually become our voice.

When did you first feel the need to start recording on your own, using your own name?

Yeah, it was never really a plan. Since high school, since teenage years, I always had home recording equipment. It used to just be a cassette four-track recorder. Now you can see it’s become quite a bit more worth of stuff. So I was always interested in sound recording, messing around with sounds, and playing with sound recordings. And I think it was about 1998, I just started to realize I had been recording a bunch of songs that didn’t have a home. They were songs I was recording. At the time, I lived in San Francisco in a pretty busy area. It was always noisy outside, and I had an acoustic guitar, and I was just putting down some really simple ideas, maybe at three or four a.m., when the city was finally quiet. I put down these real soft—I had to sing softly, because I didn’t want to wake my housemates—and I just made these really simple songs.

After a while, I realized I had a lot of them, and I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t know what it was. I felt that if I put out a record with my own name, maybe that would be too self-centered, too egotistic. But I talked with some close friends, and they encouraged me. They said, “No, this is your music. This is your private music. You should just own it, and it’s okay.” So I took that step, and that opened up, obviously, a door for me, which I’ve been walking on that path and evolving that path ever since. Because first I do something by accident, and I stumble into it, and it just happens without planning. And then once I see that that is a pathway open to me, I can walk forward to it with more intent.

Do places like northern Germany or Idaho influence your writing?

Landscapes and people’s relationship to landscapes and to the earth itself has been something I’ve been singing about all along. My record before this new one, No Wilderness Deep Enough, which came out in 2020, was written by accident at my wife’s ancestral home, where her family has lived on one home site for over 500 years. Just a small little house on what was a small, simple farm. There was an emotional weight in thinking about that—I mean, that’s even older than the country, right? 500 years—it was totally different. It’s just this land, this piece of earth, and the ground, and this one family that has stayed on it. I think I just channeled some of that energy through. But when I think about it, I’ve also lived here on 12 acres of forest in North Idaho for the last 20 years.

I’ve really gotten to know every little piece of it, most of the trees and most of the animals that live here, the differences of the wildflowers and the different plants that grow, and the way the sun and the moon interact when they are traveling across the sky in all four seasons—how the snow is going to fall, how to deal with the snow. It has really helped me try to reconnect with what it means to be part of the wild earth, part of nature. I think the thing I’ve been singing about my whole life is there’s a sorrow and sadness that has created a sickness in our species, which creates greed and war and trying to control other humans, and manipulate the planet. I think it comes from thinking of ourselves as different from the earth. As soon as we became disconnected from the earth, that gave human beings the right to exploit it and everything on it. I don’t know the answers, but I know those are the questions I’ve been asking my whole life, even though I wasn’t old enough or wise enough to know that’s what I was singing about. Of course, I sing about my personal life, emotions, and struggles, but always in the context of the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is that we are disconnected from ourselves because we are disconnected from being a part of everything. We see nature as a place to go, a place you visit. You vacation in nature. But we are nature—we just forgot.

The album’s title comes from Aldo Leopold. How did you first come across his work, and what does that phrase mean to you now?

His book, Sand County Almanac, is considered an influence on later ecologists. He was an early American conservationist and ecologist. He came from the wrong side; he was a hunter and fisherman, an outdoorsman who loved being outdoors. I think he was hired by the United States government when we were first creating what would become the agency in charge of wildlife and wild lands. He initially had the old mentality of killing predator species and not respecting the whole system. But he had a personal revelation where he saw the connectedness of everything, and he saw the beauty in how everything was related. He became one of the first voices from within the mainstream to speak out against our disconnection from nature and our lack of understanding.

He saw that the way we were trying to manage our natural world was incorrect. His writings were radical for the time, but we wouldn’t view them as radical now—they’re just common sense. Still, he influenced a lot of later writers, some of the more radical environmentalists as well. I first read the more modern writers, and they kept referencing him as an influence, so I went and tracked that down. I took that phrase a little bit out of context. He said something to the effect of, “Once you receive an ecological education, one lives alone in a world of wounds,” which I take to mean once you see what’s going on, you walk through the world with a devastating sorrow for what is happening. He was saying this in the thirties, almost a hundred years ago. In that way, he was ahead of his time. The environmental movements didn’t really catch hold until the sixties and seventies. That reinforces the idea that I’ve always been singing about this sorrow, this sadness, and this longing for connection—for a return to seeing ourselves as we’re supposed to be.

Many songs seem to carry a sense of mourning—for nature, for time, for some lost connection. Do you write from that place consciously?

I don’t write anything consciously. Whenever I have an idea that comes from the brain and I try to work on it, I hit a wall and it never feels good. I have to open myself up to just let it happen on its own and let the songs take me where they want to go. Every human being who taps into the creative—we’re all tapping into that same endless well of inspiration, but because of our own interests and individual educations, experiences, and perspectives, we filter that infinite creativity into something we enjoy and like. That’s how I think I do it. My craft is in editing, filtering, and framing it within my own experience, my own language, my own word choices, my own melody choices, my own sonic decisions. But I try to leave myself open to allowing things to happen and to feel right. I don’t chase down that rabbit hole until it feels right. Otherwise, all the best intellectual ideas kind of die on the vine.

Was there a central image or idea that held the album together for you as it took shape?

I think the biggest realization I had while creating it was because the album before, I told you, had happened kind of by accident. I wrote it at my wife’s parents’ house with a simple little keyboard, and I didn’t think I was making a record. I accidentally wrote a bunch of chord progressions that turned into a whole record. I thought I was just playing around while I wasn’t sleeping because I had jet lag. So No Wilderness Deep Enough happened really without trying. It just appeared. What I learned from that was I loved singing into these different soundscapes. Before, I wrote primarily on guitar, and now I’m writing primarily with piano and synthesizer and strings in mind. It pulls something different out of my voice. I learned that on the last record, again, without trying, without meaning to.

But after touring those songs, I realized that I really loved that, I preferred singing into these lush soundscapes of synthesizers and piano and strings. It moves me differently, and it really inspires me right now. So I definitely shaped this record around what I experienced making that record and touring those songs. Even though a couple of the ideas on this new record predate No Wilderness Deep Enough, they were sitting around waiting to find where they fit in. Once I had that vision of this sound, they made sense. I was able to shape all of it around and incorporate the spoken word element as well, because I had also been reading some of my poetry during the sets. So putting it into a song like Dawning of the Day made sense to me. Right now, it feels like the most evolved record of my life, and the most emotional record of my life as a solo artist—this is what I’ve been looking for all along. Even though I’m 55 years old, I’m just now finding my voice.

You’ve mentioned trance states and “alignment with the flow of the universe” during sound-making. Do these moments come unexpectedly, or do you seek them out?

They mostly happen unexpectedly. They happen when a sound draws you in unexpectedly, when a sound pulls you down that rabbit hole and you can’t leave. I was talking to somebody about this the other day, that when you really have the opportunity to get lost in music, music does something to time—it changes time. Some artists can create a 20-minute piece that feels like it goes by in a flash, and other artists write a two-and-a-half-minute pop song that goes on a huge journey within two-and-a-half minutes, like Willie Nelson or something. He can pack so much into two-and-a-half minutes of music. I just trust that it will happen. I can’t make it happen,

I can’t force it, but the more I learn to surrender to the flow, the better it happens. And I think I am good at allowing that to happen quickly because I have a very busy lifestyle—a full-time job, I run our record label, I’m a parent, I’m a husband, I have multiple musical projects, I manage my own stuff, I’m DIY with everything. My creative periods of time are very short, so I have to make the most out of very small pieces of time. I’ve learned to be good at slipping into that state pretty quickly, but I don’t consciously do it. I think I’ve just become good at entering it.

How has your work in education shaped your relationship to language, music, and attention?

Well, I think that working with children, with young human beings, keeps me very grounded and is one way of connecting with the greater sense of things because they are not yet jaded. They still have a magical way of seeing the world in a lot of ways. They haven’t had the magic of the world beaten out of them yet by reality—well, by the story we tell ourselves is reality. I think we could tell ourselves a different story, but the story we’re all living in our modern Western society is a strange one. They see through all of the masks adults wear, they see through all of the stuff, and it just comes down to really simple things, which becomes, for me, very profound. I think that they keep me young at heart, and they keep me focused on what is good, when it could be really easy in this world to focus on what is bad. There’s no shortage of voices whispering in our ears that everything’s fucked. They give me positivity, they keep me grounded, they give me voice. Teaching about language makes me think clearly, to be accurate with words, to be accurate with language, to be careful with language, because language, first of all, is very limited. You’re lucky—you have more than one language. I don’t know how many languages you speak, but obviously at least two. Whereas I’m your typical dumb American who has one language. And I don’t think the English language has all of the necessary words and subtlety and nuance to say everything that needs to be said.

There’s a lack of subtlety, or there are certain things built into our language that are not helpful—the systems of control, the systems of empire, the systems of religion are all built into the language. Language can be very helpful, language can be very hurtful, but that’s why poetry and music are so necessary—because we can reframe the words and reframe the language and give it a depth. One of my favorite artists of the last 20 years is the Norwegian band Wardruna, and they sing in Norse. I don’t understand a word that they are singing, but I watch it move a lot of people—it has an emotional response in people. It’s the same if I listen to Celtic music or French music. I don’t have another language, but it’s not necessary with music—music carries the emotion forward and the intent forward. So I think poetry reframes words, and we can use them in more powerful ways by not following the rules. And music is a whole language unto itself that transcends language. So I really rely on music and poetry to say what I need to say because maybe I don’t have enough gift of my language, or our language is just too limiting.

Have you already started working on new material, or are there ideas you’re currently collecting for what comes next?

Not really yet. There’s always some things on the back burner, but last year I released three Harvestman records, which was almost everything I had within the Harvestman world sitting around. With the solo stuff, there are a couple of songs still around. There’s a couple I actually recorded with the record that didn’t fit with that record, so they’re done and waiting to figure out where they fit. And a few ideas, but I’m not actively working on it, because since I released the Harvestman records last year and this new album this spring—and since I’m also running the record label and doing promotion—I just traveled to Roadburn for an artist residency, where I did multiple things, including an infinite ambient soundtrack always changing to the paintings of Thomas Hooper, through multiple channels. I worked a lot on that ambient soundscape, creating a space, and that took a lot of time. I just played a festival in Toronto. All of that was happening during the school year. We had our last day of school on Friday, and I’m getting ready to go to Europe for a month. So, yeah, not a lot of time to work on stuff lately.

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others