Torn Hawk

The moniker Torn Hawk belongs to producer and visual artist Luke Wyatt, whose early work centered on the self-coined practice of “video mulching,” a heavily processed collage technique that drew from VHS sources such as 1980s teen and action films as well as pornography. He first gained attention in 2009, though he gradually introduced more original material in subsequent years. An avowed enthusiast of pop culture and cinema—he grew up with a step-mother who ran an independent movie theater in Charlotte, Virginia—Wyatt’s visual and sonic creations convey both sincerity and immediacy.

His initial wider recognition arrived via the 2012 Tarifa EP on Ron Morelli’s L.I.E.S. white-label series. That same year Peoples Potential Unlimited, the rare 1980s boogie reissue imprint, commissioned him to assemble the unseen party and music footage compilation PPU Video Party on VHS, while he also crafted videos for Mock & Toof, I:Cube, Mi Ami, and Ex-Vivian. The following year proved especially active, yielding output on No Pain in Pop, Emotional Response (under the Lossmaker alias), a pair of 12-inch releases on Morelli’s primary label, and his own Valcrond Video imprint. In 2014 he issued his debut long-player Through Force of Will—available as a download and limited cassette—on Amanda Brown’s Not Not Fun, and prepared the white-label Quadrifolio for later release. November brought his Mexican Summer debut Let’s Cry and Do Pushups at the Same Time, marked by a more restrained aesthetic.

After additional 12-inch records on Valcrond Video and L.I.E.S., Torn Hawk’s next album appeared in May 2016. Titled Union and Return and shaped by the power of positive thinking, his relocation to Berlin, nineteenth-century Romanticism, and the paintings of Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Caspar David Friedrich, the set departed further from collage-based methods in favor of meticulously arranged, emotionally forthright pieces.

During 2017 he reworked material by Daze and Grey People; his own projects included the EBM-influenced EPs Wormquest and Men With No Memory as well as the collaborative Hungry for Candy with Florian Kupfer. Under his own name Wyatt also released the emotive album Heretic, which took 1990s electronica as its point of departure, while the compilation I Like Movies About Old Books That Have Powers collected previously unreleased Torn Hawk recordings from the first half of the decade. He returned to L.I.E.S. in 2018 with Time Is a Scam, which merged retro synth-scapes, dub, psych-rock, and doom; later that year Valcrond Video issued another compilation, Fragments So Far 2. In 2020 Wyatt introduced vocals into Torn Hawk’s music for the first time on Here Comes Language and supplied the archival collection White Labels And Outtakes: 2011-2014. The darkly danceable March 2022 album Ski Mask, Jolt Cola, Saturday Detention was followed that November by Toxic Sincerity, a blend of spoken-word monologues and atmospheric pieces Wyatt characterized as “advice pop.”