Ali Maloney is a theatre-maker, rapper, performer and experimental sound designer from Edinburgh. His career in these fields has been long and wide-ranging, from the much-missed, fearsomely experimental Anatomy performance nights, to ‘spoken weird’ rap collective Chemical Poets, to acclaimed stage shows like After Metamorphosis, based on the Franz Kafka novel.
Among other things, we discuss his short story in the award-winning collection Nova Scotia Volume Two, his music under the name Harlequinade — including Sileni and CHURCH OF WHEN THE SHIT HITS THE FAN — and his latest project, the ambitious audio drama / horror podcast Caledeonian Gothic.
Ali is an old friend and regular collaborator of mine, so this one features a lot of chat about the old days, our linked origins as writers and performers, our shared love of transgressive films, fiction and music, and the new ground he is breaking as a podcaster and storyteller. Strap in, and watch out for the tentacles.
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Recommendations from Ali Maloney
The first collaboration I saw Ali fronting was the band Sileni, a two-person experimental hip-hop collective with production from Gung Who, aka Owen Green. This would have been around 2005 or 2006, and acted as a showcase for Ali’s visceral blend of Burroughs-influenced, cut-up horror-rap, and his strong visual aesthetic drawing on video nasties, and the monsters of H.P. Lovecraft and Clive Barker.
There aren’t many pictures or videos from that pre-social media era, but you can get a strong sense of the alchemy at play in that collaboration by listening to their albums Riders on the Conquering Worm (from 2009), and Codex Teuthis (2014). Ali says he met Owen in 2016, which is either a mistake, or proof the pair have finally perfected time travel in addition to grand guignol horror rap.
Ali mentions some early influences, including Czech stop-motion animator Jan Švankmajer, and Guelph, Ontario alt-rap collective Plague Language. Švankmajer’s work is phenomenal, visionary, gross and weird — check out his adaptation of Alice in Wonderland below.
We go on to talk about the formation of Chemical Poets, the three-man acapella rap collective we formed alongside Tickle McNicholl, which eventually birthed a stage show called Twenty Tentacle, and the collection Chemical Poets Manual 01, initially published by Red Squirrel Press. We performed as a trio for a few years, taking part in the growing Scottish spoken word scene, and both Ali and I look back fondly on this as an influential and original project which led directly on to some of our later work. You can watch us at our peak below, in a recording of our 2010 Edinburgh Fringe show.
Ali’s next two shows after Twenty Tentacle were collaborations with Gung Who, and Asthmatic Astronaut, also the producer of the Strange Exiles theme, and one of the main forces — along with Ali, Tickle, myself and a few others — behind our boutique label and collective Black Lantern Clan. Asthmatic Astronaut just released his first new music in a while, the album it tastes like, which you should go and download now. Asthmatic Astronaut was also the producer of Church Of When The Shit Hits The Fan — you can see their video for ‘Under the Last Dust’ below.
The first of these three theatre shows was Hydronomicon (with Asthmatic Astronaut), the second was Ratcatcher, with Mazzula Hula (part of the 2012 SURGE Festival). The third was a Kafka adaptation, After Metamorphosis, with some help from Puppet Animation Scotland (now known as Manipulate Arts), physical theatre artist Lewis Sherlock, and Gung Who.
Each of these shows garnered strong praise in reviews, and saw Ali push further into multimedia devised performance and experimental sound design. Both were influenced by the diploma Ali completed in physical theatre, under tutors including the amazing Al Seed. Ali mentions Seed’s show The Fooligan as a penny-drop moment, when he realised that physical theatre was something he wanted to explore. Read about The Fooligan over here at The Scotsman. At the course, Ali studied various physical theatre disciplines including bouffon, the art of clowning.
Next, we go on to discuss Ali’s contribution to Nova Scotia Volume Two, which came out in 2025 from Luna Press. A follow-up to the critically adored first volume, it was edited once again by Andrew J. Wilson and Neil Williamson, two respected authors, editors and publishers in Scotland with a focus on new, high-concept SF and weird fiction. Read a bit more about the collection over at The Bottle Imp.
Ali’s story, ‘Grimaldo the Weeping’, was (appropriately enough) about a very creepy clown. The collection also features work from such luminaries as comics legend Grant Morrison, novelists Doug Johnstone and Ken Macleod, and weird fiction supremo Chris Kelso (who spoke to me for Episode 38 last year).
Both the Nova Scotia collections, and some of Ali and I’s best performance work, spun out of the writing and performance collective Writers Bloc, based in Edinburgh. Revolving around monthly workshops and crit groups, with regular devised performances featuring the group, Bloc is a fantastic proving ground for emerging talent — as shown by the recent success of current and former members like Rhiannon A. Grist and science fiction visionary Hannu Rajaniemi, among others.
Next we talk about Ali’s style as a writer, and he namechecks Clive Barker and Shaun Hutson as early (way too early!) influences. We get sidetracked by talking about video nasties, and what it felt like as 80s kids to go into a video shop and scare ourselves silly just by looking at the front covers. For both of us, this generated a powerful and precocious hunger for books and films that were weird, violent, transgressive and experimental, from 70s and 80s horror classics like Evil Dead, A Nightmare on Elm Street and House, to the influx of hyper-violent manga in the late 80s and early 90s, and films like the cyberpunk / body horror masterpiece Tetsuo.
All of this was tied heavily to the medium of tape — something Ali would go on to explore in his narratives for Caledonian Gothic. He got similar kicks, spending time in the 1980s in New York, from imagining what it would have been like to attend a show by the black metal band Mayhem, and reading the William Burroughs classic Naked Lunch. We discuss the power of the unseen versus exposition and lore, and how films, games and shows like Alien, the recent Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, and the game Hollow Knight: Silksong employ this, to varying degrees of success.
We talk in earnest about Caledonian Gothic in the second half of the show. Ali mentions the peculiar tendency of books by the aforementioned Hutson and Barker — but also Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft — to involve the metatextual trope of making the main character a writer. That was an influence that Ali has carried throughout his work in different disciplines, and which is fully realised in the new season of Caledonian Gothic.
He also brings a strong focus of formal experimentation with narrative structure to both this and the first season, which he attributes in part to the David Lynch film Lost Highway. As Ali says, quoting a friend: “It’s a film about a haunting — but the film itself is haunted.” He talks about how this allows him to draw the listener into the story, making them a part of it. In the first season of the show, he achieved this by using a second-person narrative. In the new season, he uses some of the techniques from his performance work, as well as stories drawn from those experiences, to create something that feels both metatextual and ‘real’ for the listener. Sound design is simultaneously a tool for creating atmosphere, and a driver of the narrative itself.
Ali talks about podcasting as a pure audio medium, and the ways he and his collaborators leverage this in Caledonian Gothic. The first season featured an original theme tune by Amber Devereux of Tin Can Audio. For season two, he worked with Asthmatic Astronaut (Devereux’s theme is carried over). As Ali says, this season features a horror story (or stories) that are explicitly about sound — allowing him to take some more ambitious creative leaps with the storytelling.
The season contains an over-arching narrative across loosely-connected, standalone tales. Ali mentions Archive 81 (later adapted by Netflix) and The Magnus Archives as podcasts with a similar approach. Another element is ‘ritual’ — it’s hard to talk more about that at this juncture without giving spoilers, so go and check out the show to find out more about how he carries off these two approaches. It’s available at Bandcamp (see below), and everywhere you find your podcasts. You’ll also find Ali over on Buesky and Instagram.
We finish with a little chat about H.P. Lovecraft, and whether his work has influenced Ali more as a body of writing, or as a fertile seed-bed for genre work inspired by the mythos and aesthetic of cosmic horror, which is largely attributed to Lovecraft. He mentions Jeff Vandermeer’s analysis of the tentacle in the introduction to The Weird, a compendium of short fiction. Ali mentions the Lovecraft story ‘Pickman’s Model’ as an early influence.
Finally, Ali namedrops one of my all-time favourite bands, Edinburgh’s Penpushers. Do yourself a favour and check out their seminal album Last Vestige of Holism (2002) as an example of the currents both Ali and I swam in as emerging rappers and storytellers growing up in Scotland’s most crepuscular city, which birthed The Strange Casse of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde, Confessions of a Justified Sinner and many other tales of the weird and eerie.
Up next: Clare Follmann
My next guest is author and environmentalist Clare Follmann. We’ll be discussing her book Scapegoat: What the Invasive Species Gets Wrong, recently released by AK Press. Her writing engages with themes of landscape, ecology, climate crisis, language, and philosophy.
Clare likes to poke holes in dominant or obsolete narratives, and strives to both listen to and help uplift the voices and stories that have been too often cast aside. Her work focuses on finding and planting the literal and figurative seeds that will help support a post-capitalist society that prioritizes the well-being of people and planet.
See you in a few weeks!
— Bram E. Gieben, Glasgow, May 2026
