LINK: https://polypores.bandcamp.com/album/ongs-hat-compleat-official-soundtrack
Also, a great write-up of this project: https://moonbuilding.substack.com/p/issue-73-1-august-2025
The soundtrack to the audiobook version of Ong’s Hat: Compleat
New addition: Hat Complete soundtrack! The dl now includes a PDF of the text version of the book, kindly provided by Joseph Matheny. It’s full of links to take you down that rabbithole. If you’ve already got it, just dl it again to get the PDF.
Back in the early 1990s, a conspiracy theory/urban legend was doing the rounds on internet messageboards, about a group of scientists and mystics who opened a portal to an alternative dimension in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. In Ong’s Hat:Compleat, the creator of this fascinating piece of living, infinite art, Joseph Matheny, talks to podcaster and AI wizard Sequoya Kennedy about its intentions and origins, and all manner of highly weird shit that happened in the process.
It’s a tale that intertwines early AI, paranormal encounters, emergent phenomena, and the nascent Internet culture of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The story is a rich tapestry woven from diverse cultural threads:
Psychedelic and avant-garde art movements
Punk rock and industrial music scenes
Experimental theater and method acting
Hermetic magick and beat literature
The Esalen Institute’s influence
Philip K. Dick’s literary works
This narrative is a modern spiritual quest that blends these eclectic elements into a compelling journey.
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I’m super-thrilled to be involved with this, as a big fan of both Matheny and Kennedy’s previous work. Those who are watching carefully might remember that Matheny’s Ong’s Hat project was a big inspiration behind my album “There Are Other Worlds”, so it really means a lot to be onboard.
The soundtrack was created using a modular synthesizer I put together for the occasion, relying on a number of techniques including (but not limited to) chaos, random generation, feedback loops, tarot, the I Ching, cybernetic systems, trance, self-generation, mind-altering chemicals, The Gateway Tapes, and automatic writing,
I hope some of you will check this out, it’s a fascinating story, weirder than most fiction, and somehow still self-perpetuating…
Check it out here: josephmatheny.com/ongs-hat-compleat/
(Also available on Amazon/Google Play etc)
I’d highly recommend either paperback or audiobook “Ong’s Hat: The Beginning” as a good place to start.
Or the audiobook/podcast “This Is Not A Game” by Marc Fennell – which offers a good intro to the whole thing,
credits
released July 28, 2025
Written and performed by Stephen James Buckley – October 2024
Thanks to Joseph and Sequoya for having me on board, and to Peter C Hine and his part in making these connections happen.
POLYPORES ‘Ong’s Hat Complete – Official Soundtrack’
Yes, I know this soundtrack was released earlier in the year, but it makes the jump to Polypores’ Bandcamp page this week and very much deserves a revisit. Stephen Buckley first mentioned ‘Ong’s Hat’ to me when we were talking about his 2024 CiS album ‘There Are Other Worlds’ for Moonbuilding Issue 5. He said it was a big influence, not just on that album, but on his work in general.
What is it? Well, ‘Ong’s Hat’ is a “multimedia fictional narrative” created by Joseph Matheny that went on to become an online phenomenon. It was one of the very first online alternate reality games. For fear of getting bogged down before I’ve even got to the music, an ARG is an interactive online multiplayer game that takes place in the real world, involves different forms of media, unfurls in real time and is influenced by player involvement.
The game started with the discovery of an 1980’s brochure for The Institute of Chaos Studies and Moorish Science Ashram. Ong’s Hat professed to be a lost town in the mighty Pine Barrens forest of New Jersey and was where a group of outcast Princeton professors retreated, setting up an ashram from where they discovered and undertook inter-dimensional time travel. Through player embellishment the game took on mythical status with many believing the stories being spun. There’s a great piece on gizmodo.com that brings home just how effective the storytelling was with Matheny’s life, even today, plagued by people wanting answers to what is one of the internet’s earliest conspiracy theories.
On a lighter note, the influence of Ong’s Hat resonates right through our musical world too, from Pye Corner Audio’s ‘Black Mill Tapes’, through the entire output of labels like Ghost Box and Clay Pipe to tales of Abul Mogard being a retired steel worker from Gdansk and even Stephen Buckley’s own story of the legend of Stefan Bachmeier.
So back to the matter in hand. Back in January, Joseph Matheny released a completist’s guide to ‘Ong’s Hat’. Called ‘Ong’s Hat: Compleat’, natch, it’s a book and lengthy audio series, but in fine Ong style the audio version, available on Audible and Bandcamp, is 14.5 hours of discussions that use the book as a jumping off point rather than being an audio version of the book. It fair blows the mind. Which I guess is the whole point. Anyway, Polypores was asked to create the soundtrack to the audio series, which makes perfect sense. But how did such a turn come about?
“I was already talking to Matheny a bit when ‘There Are Other Worlds’ came out,” reveals Stephen. “I’d made him aware that his work had an impact on me, but I never dreamed in a million years that he’d be interested in any sort of collaboration.”
Stephen explains he got cracking on the work almost as soon as he was asked if he was interested. He talks about leaning into the concept and using those idea to determine how he worked.
“I was using a lot of unusual techniques to make things happen,” he says. “The soundtrack was created using a modular synthesiser I put together for the occasion, relying on a number of techniques including chaos, random generation, feedback loops, tarot, the I Ching, cybernetic systems, self-generation, The Gateway Tapes, and automatic writing, among others. I felt that was really in the spirit of the ‘Ong’s Hat’ project and I needed to embrace that if I was going to do it justice.”
Has he done it justice? What do you think? The fact the soundtrack sits pretty on the audio version of Matheny’s latest journey into his world speaks volumes. For the most part, the album feels like one of the more mellow Polypores offerings. ‘Formless Ocean Group’ is a beautiful almost ambient drift poked with gurgles and swirls and the deep bass note twangs and warm chords of ‘The Metamachine’ make for a delightful swirl of sound.
A lot of the tracks here are brief, minute-long sketches. It’s unusual for Stephen to distill ideas into such compact packages, but they work perfectly punctuating the album’s longer tracks as if you were peaking behind the curtain somehow, looking into a sketchbook, or ideas pool. ‘Receiver Of The Stories’, for example, is a mellow drift that undulates towards its dubby feedback and abrupt tape slurred ending. Polypores distilled!
‘Acid Code’ taps out a rhythm, as the most wonderfully warm backing shimmer gathers pace underneath, ejecting squibs of electricity as it grows. Much of the work on ‘Ong’s Hat Complete – Official Soundtrack’ does have the feel of older Polypores releases, like ‘Flora’ and ‘Azure’. There’s a mellowness here and a melodic sensibility that could have been distilled from that classic duo of releases.
“While I don’t really like going backwards, musically, it does feel a bit more akin to some of the older Polypores material like ‘Flora’,” says Stephen. “That wasn’t intentional, it just turned out that way. Whatever I channelled seemed to want it to be that way and so it was!”
As usual, as always, ‘Ong’s Hat Complete – Official Soundtrack’ is another wonderful chapter in Polypores’ most special of musical worlds. What gives it that extra umph is the doubling down effect of Stephen working on a project that resonates so deeply within his own world and, hopefully, will resonate with other ‘Ong’s Hat’ fans who aren’t yet familiar with him.
Joseph Matheny 