A guide for the exhausted: Music as a soothing retreat

Transmission 315: Interview with Matthew C. Whitaker

Matthew C. Whitaker is a Manchester-based musician whose creative output exists at the intersection of celestial chaos and terrestrial quietude. While he is widely recognized as the architect of the prog-rave ensemble HENGE—a project defined by high-decibel cosmic transmissions—his solo endeavors reveal a more introspective and fragile internal landscape. These compositions bypass the spectacle of the stage to examine the subtle frictions of human existence: the weight of physical exhaustion, the hazy contours of memory, and the profound, restorative potential found in stillness.

Title: Songs for the Weary
Artist: Matthew C. Whitaker
Release Date: 2026-02-13
Genres: Art Rock, Psych-folk, Psychedelic Rock
Description: Matthew C. Whitaker on Songs for the Weary: a sonic mirage of evanescent memories and the transition from rave to quietude.

In his recent work, specifically the collection Songs for the Weary, Whitaker embraces a sound rooted in the intimacy of classical guitar and intricate string arrangements. The result is profoundly onyrical, evoking the haunting atmosphere of certain Italian music libraries. The music functions as an Oneiric Echo, a muffled and distorted reflection of a past reality—an evanescent memory surfacing like a faded, hazy image of something long forgotten. Co-produced alongside his frequent collaborator Alan Keary, Whitaker’s solo music strips away the digital noise of the city to find something more tactile and fragile. Whether writing about the curiosities of lucid dreaming or the gentle charm of a “Chestnut Tree”, his voice remains unhurried and grounded. Whitaker has built a career that balances two polarities: the loud, communal ecstasy of the stage and the solitary, hushed reflection of the bedroom.

Featured image: Gareth Jarvis

How did you decide to start making music and what influenced that decision?

So I started, my parents sent me for classical guitar lessons when I was the age of nine and at first it was kind of a chore. They said to me, “You must practice for half an hour otherwise you can’t have your tea, your dinner,” and I love my dinner, so that was enough motivation. Then I eventually came around once I started to be able to play things that I got pleasure from. I was sucked into it and I didn’t need any bribing; I would just practice anyway and for longer and longer periods of time. By the age of 15, I’d done all my classical guitar exams and grades and I thought that I might go and study and be a professional classical guitarist, but I also around that time discovered songwriting. When that happened, I was suddenly—that’s what I wanted to do. I’ve always felt a creative urge, like the whole point of music is to make your own music, to do something yourself. As soon as I was basically just writing songs, then I had no other idea in my head. It was just: that’s all I want to do in my life. I want to write songs, record them, play shows, keep making albums and just have that as my job.

How does writing as yourself feel different from writing for Henge?

It’s very different with Henge because Henge is a concept band, it’s a science fiction concept and so the subjects to the songs kind of feel like they lean towards subjects like science, space, all these kind of things. It very much is—I feel like I’m writing to a brief when I do that. I’ll get an idea for what the subject of the song should be and then I’ll research that and then I’ll basically spend weeks sometimes trying to find the poetry in these scientific subjects which are perhaps slightly dry on the surface if you’re just going from a scientific point of view. So that’s my approach with Henge and that is definitely more—there’s more studying involved with ending up writing songs about these specific subjects which, to be honest, I probably don’t know too much about that stuff but I’m keen to learn. That’s how that works and my own personal songs—I mean sometimes I write a song and… I’d say maybe sometimes I get a musical idea and that idea could be a Henge idea or it could be a solo idea, musically speaking.

I usually explore which one it might turn out as, and this is before any lyrics. The lyrics are always at the end of the process whether that’s with Henge or my own solo songs. I usually think of them as like—once I find a subject that I want to write about, that’s usually when things start to open, the song starts to unlock. Then it can be exploring just language and meter. The feel of words is very important, almost like the mouth-feel of words is sometimes just as important as the meaning. Sometimes if you have a wonderful idea for a line but it doesn’t feel good coming out your mouth, you have to abandon that and go for the thing which has a musical feeling within the language as well. There are all these elements which are sometimes a big puzzle to be solved, and I do sometimes feel like the last part of songwriting, the lyrics part of it, does sometimes feel like it’s more difficult or it’s more of a challenge, a puzzle. I also just make sure that I sit down and I carry on until I’m happy with what I’ve written as well. I sometimes have to spend a long time of being very determined until it comes out.

I’ve always felt like a creative urge, like the whole point of things, of music is to make your own music, to do something yourself. […] That’s all I want to do in my life is I want to write songs, record them, play shows, keep making albums and just have that as my job.

Is this album intended to be a continuous journey or a collection of individual songs?

So Songs for the Weary does have a kind of theme tied together, but it’s more of a musical kind of a feeling. A theme of the vibe is tying it all together and it’s not as much of a concept record as like Henge’s Journey to Voltus B which has this chronological story unfolding. Songs for the Weary is more a series of individual compositions that go together and there are parts of it which actually flow musically, which segue from one song into another, so it feels quite continuous. It doesn’t have a disruptive element in terms of the music; it’s all quite serene and that’s why I called it Songs for the Weary because I wanted it to be… I wanted to point people towards the idea you can use this album as something soothing for when you know if you’re tired or exhausted or hung over or if you’re looking for some relaxation, then this could be the musical accompaniment to that.

Are you a frequent lucid dreamer yourself?

I wouldn’t say I’m frequent, but I have had lucid dreams and I’ve had some adventures, yeah. I like it. I’ve had a good experience and since I released the song, I’ve had some people getting in touch in the comments saying that they are lucid dreamers too. Some people are positive about it but one person was like, “I have lucid dreams every night and I wake up exhausted, it’s horrible.” So not everyone’s as much of a fan of it as I am, but I find it’s quite a psychedelic adventure. To be in the dream realm and know that that’s where you are and then be able to make choices within that is very exciting.

Are there any non-musical artists which influenced the sound or the mood of the album?

Yeah, I’d say so. Probably composers that are associated more with film scores like Henry Mancini. Particularly there’s a piece called Lujon which has a gorgeous string arrangement in it and I felt like—well, I’d been listening to that to go to sleep myself and I’d been using that as music that I put on when I’m weary before I had the idea for the album and before I knew that I was wanting to use strings and things like that in the arrangement to these pieces. That was a very deliberate, very important kind of milestone in suggesting where to go. Also I’ve always loved Ennio Morricone whose film scores are very evocative and there’s… in my older album as well you can hear the influence of Ennio Morricone in The Man with the Anvil Hat and some of the sort of cowboy guitar sounds but put into my music with my own sort of singing voice which is very much in my own accent, my English accent. It’s just to take little parts of these things and to weave them together as something that’s my own rather than trying to copy anything of other people’s. It’s more of like a sound thing like the string sound on this or the guitar sound on that. I also really like Nick Drake and I like the stripped-down nature of that. The finger-picking style is different to mine—it’s very much like folk style whereas I have more of a classical guitar style—but that idea of the soft singing and the classical guitar, that’s also something in bossa nova music which I like. So yeah, I think there are some significant influences on it.

I called it Songs for the Weary because I wanted to point people towards the idea you can use this album as something soothing for when, if you’re tired or exhausted or hung over… if you’re looking for some relaxation then this could be the musical accompaniment to that.

Which track was the hardest to finish?

Lucid Dreamer. Yeah, it was just… we had a lot of sessions on that one. It probably took three times as long to finish as any of the other songs. I’m not sure why. We had built it up—I’d made a demo of the track on my own with not great recording equipment, just quickly to get the idea down, and then we sort of built back up from the demo. We kept some elements and then we recorded some drums over and then we just tried a lot of different things before we settled on what we were happy with. It took a little bit longer to find that and we kept trying different things, but we got there in the end I think.

Does Manchester’s urban landscape bleed into your sound for this record?

That’s an interesting question and I guess so. I guess so, maybe more so with Henge actually because Manchester has a history in rave music which we channel that a bit into the Henge sound with combined rave and prog rock and psychedelic elements. Manchester in my tracks—I guess yeah, mainly in the sort of perhaps the observations I make and the voice that I have being my own, but perhaps that’s a little more in the background or a bit more subtle.

A Henge show is rowdy, sweaty, and raucous, with people dressed as aliens. A Matthew C. Whitaker show is the opposite: very quiet, gentle music, softly sung to a seated audience. They are two different worlds, very far apart.

How did Alan Keary influence the album’s DNA?

Alan Keary is a wonderful producer. He makes music as Shunya which is a kind of electronic and folk-tronica, you could call it, which is a whole other thing, but he’s also a string arranger and he lives just around the corner from me and he’s one of my best friends. I’ve always loved big sort of string parts in the 1960s sound—very romantic sounding strings. To have the opportunity to use that—we got together and then we were like “let’s put strings on this” and it was like a really exciting idea. We arranged together what that would sound like and then he very laboriously recorded the strings one at a time. So he would do one track of strings then move further away from the microphone, another take, and it would layer up to the point where one of the tracks had 100 individual tracks. This was all Alan, 100 Alans. When you think of it like that, his character in the album—the string parts and also just his production, mixing, his choices and his bass playing. He doesn’t play all the bass—there’s some double bass played on a couple of tracks by someone else, Pete Turner is the other bass player—but Alan plays the Hofner bass, the like Paul McCartney one, and some synthesizers and things as well. There’s so much about the album that is Alan. I owe him a huge debt of gratitude because I just wouldn’t have made an album like this. I wouldn’t be able to pay a string orchestra to record on my music and I would never be able to do that. The album that we’ve made together through a lot of hard work and a lot of time and a lot of overdubbing is just something that I’m so happy that it exists and I’m so grateful to Alan for having agreed to make it with me.

How will the energy differ between a Henge show and your solo tour?

Oh, the most different that it could be; total opposites. A Henge show is rowdy, people are dancing, people are dressed up as aliens, we have costumes, it’s loud, it’s sweaty, it’s very raucous. And then a Matthew C. Whitaker show is very quiet, very gentle music, softly singing, usually everyone’s quiet and just listening and sat down hopefully as well a lot of the time. They are two different worlds very, very far apart and it’s nice to have the two things that are very different experiences for me to give these concerts. It helps, yeah, it keeps things interesting for me to have different things going on.

I called it Songs for the Weary because I wanted to point people towards the idea that you can use this album as a soothing retreat—a musical accompaniment for when you are exhausted or looking for relaxation.

How much of your classical guitar background is hidden in these tracks?

There’s quite a lot actually. A lot of the playing is with my fingers. Some of the songs that didn’t end up having much guitar in them like Stand Up To The Man, the song at the end, that was written on the classical guitar and then re-imagined as a string quartet. So I think apart from Lucid Dreamer, I think everything was written on the guitar, everything was written with the classical guitar in my hands and it feels like that is at the heart of it even when that’s not obvious in the way that it’s come out afterwards.

What’s next on your creative horizon for this year?

Well we are just finishing recording the fifth Henge album. Towards the end of last year there was a big effort to finish the writing of that and we got into the studio. First thing we did this year was straight into the studio and spent 10 days in there and now we’ve just got a few bits left of that. That should be finished soon; we’ll be releasing that next year. Then I’ll be touring solo, so I’m doing a tour with Alan in the UK for the next couple of months and then going on tour with Henge in Europe. Then I’m going to stay behind in Europe and do my own solo tour around—I’ve got a few dates in Germany and Belgium and then it’ll be summer. Not much creative stuff happens in the summer because we’re at festivals all over the world bringing alien rave to the masses, but then in the autumn I plan to start work on my third solo album as well.

Photos courtesy of Matthew C. Whitaker

Matteo Damiani

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