When he formed The Awakening in 1995 in his native South Africa, singer/multi-instrumentalist Ashton Nyte created a new take on the gothic and darkwave sound, infusing it with a certain poetic, atmospheric quality. With twelve albums – most recently, their self-titled release last year – they’ve steadily built up a worldwide following. Fans across Europe and the western region of North America will get to see The Awakening as they tour from July through November. (The European dates are headlining shows, while the North American shows are part of the newly created Glōm Fest – see full list below.) As if all that wasn’t keeping Nyte busy enough, he also put out a new single, “Made of Rain (Almost Acoustic),” in mid-June in collaboration with the L.A. darkwave collective Beauty in Chaos and fellow vocalist Whitney Tai. During a recent video call from his home in St. Louis, Nyte tells The Big Takeover about all of this work, as well as reflecting on his childhood in South Africa and how that led him to begin his remarkable music career.
What can people expect when they come to one of your upcoming shows in Europe and North America?
ASHTON NYTE: They can expect mass hysteria akin to Beatlemania. And that’s just me: that’s how excited I am! [laughs] I’ve been playing and touring in a solo capacity on an ongoing basis, but this is the first proper full band Awakening tour in nine years, so we’re excited. The new [self-titled] album came out in October last year, and there have been a few albums before that that have filled in the gaps between our last tours, so you can expect a lot of new songs, and of course the old favorites, as well. We’re currently sewing up our stage outfits to try and look absolutely beautiful for everyone, so you can expect that, too.
You’ve also just released a new single with Beauty in Chaos. Can you give an overview of that project for people who might not be familiar with your work with them?
ASHTON NYTE: I was fortunate to be invited to join Beauty in Chaos pretty much from the beginning. [BIC leader] Michael Ciravolo and I ended up writing what became the very first single for Beauty in Chaos, which is a song called “Storm,” back in 2018. He has kindly kept inviting me to sing on every album, except the one that was an all-female fronted album. We work really well together. He writes beautiful pieces of music, and I try and match them with hopefully beautiful vocal melodies and lyrics. And that’s how the whole project works: he has different singers on different pieces of music, and it’s up to us to essentially turn the pieces of music into songs and write the lyrics. “Made of Rain (Almost Acoustic)” is, I think, our fifth or sixth, or maybe seventh song together. I’ve lost count. The full version of the song “Made of Rain” was on the full album [2024’s Dancing with Angels]. And of course Whitney Tai is joining me on vocals, and that really just sounds magical to me; I absolutely love her voice. Honestly, recording the music video was an almost spiritual experience. It was so lovely to see this organic realization of the reinvention of something that was already special to me. So it was honestly a very emotional experience, and I’m very happy with how it all turned out.
You’ve been so prolific – where do you get your inspiration?
ASHTON NYTE: I’ve always said that I suffer from a compulsive songwriting disease, where I just literally can’t stop doing it. I love the process. Honestly, it’s how I express myself. It’s how I figure out how I fit into the world. It’s how I try and understand relationships between things. And I just think that there’s never going to be a shortage of inspiration to do that. That, and I’m inspired by so many different artists, by so many different art forms. One of my favorite directors this Ingmar Bergman, so I could sit down and watch a Bergman movie, and then go and write an album afterwards, based on whatever I’ve just seen. So if you add every TV show, and band, and relationship, and a walk in the park – and of course one of my biggest inspirations is sitting over there, that’s my cat, Willow. Everything. It’s relationships, and how we fit into the world. So yeah, so I just don’t think I’ll stop doing that any time soon.
Do you approach your songwriting differently when you’re writing for the band, as opposed to when you’re focused on your solo work?
ASHTON NYTE: Usually the song comes first, and then it tells me where it wants to go. I think I just know, the way you know that the child on the left is yours and the child on the right is actually somebody else’s. There are obviously songs that blur the line, that could well be either a solo song or an Awakening song. But generally speaking, my work with The Awakening falls into the grander gothic rock, darkwave, dark rock, gothic metal – there’s a whole realm of things, and I get to be as theatrical as I would like to be. And with the solo albums, through the years, I’ve tried to intentionally step outside of that particular world. But generally speaking, I work thematically. So if I’m creating an Awakening album, there’s a theme and an undercurrent and a motif that will fit with that. And if I’m feeling really inspired to make something fragile and beautiful and very personal, it feels natural that that’s linked to me as a human being in the most fundamental sense, so therefore, it’s a solo record. It sounds really convoluted, but I actually don’t overthink it at all. I just create what I want to create, and put the things together, and hope it makes sense and means something to people.
How did you learn to write like this in the first place?
ASHTON NYTE: I love poetry and literature. At school, my strongest subjects were English and Afrikaans. Afrikaans is my second language. As a South African, going to school when I did, that was the second language we learned, and we would learn a third language to some degree, an African language. But we kept English and Afrikaans through my whole school career. So I was writing poems in my second language at the age of seven or eight. I think there’s a fascination with how words work, and the power of the written and the spoken and the sung word. Growing up as I did and when I did, I think many South African authors and poets and writers influenced me, and ultimately shone a light on alternative ways of thinking about the country and the way things were, and my place within that.
What made you want to be a musician, instead of something where you were purely a writer, like a novelist or a poet?
ASHTON NYTE: I blame Elvis Presley for that. When I was about five years old, I saw the rerun of the “’68 Comeback Special,” and he started off with, “Are you looking for trouble?” And I said, “Yes, yes I am, pick me!” He made me want to sing. At the age of eight, I discovered David Bowie, and he made me want to be an artist and write my own songs. Not long after that, I discovered Kate Bush, and she made me want to be a magician. And so it continues.
You listed a pretty broad range of influences. So how did you hit upon your own distinctive sound out of all of that?
ASHTON NYTE: Stumbling along, honestly. I grew up in Johannesburg, and art was not really encouraged at our school. It was a very bad time for the country, and we were all discouraged from pursuing an artistic path. And I think if there’s one thing a kid likes to do, it’s to go in the exact opposite direction to whatever you’re being told. And of course that led into testing what you’re being taught, and testing what the perceptions are. So, performing music in any way outside of singing in the school choir – actually chasing it down in a songwriter sense – just seemed like this magical hallowed ground that I wanted to roll around on, and exist in, for as much as I could. It was just the sheer desire to hear myself sing songs, which then led to wanting to hear myself on the radio, which led to recording. As for learning how to play, it was all just figuring it out. It was just borrowing a guitar and playing one note at a time until there were two notes, and then I wrote a song with those two, even though they weren’t even chords. To me, it always comes back to the song. Everything is to celebrate and to support the song. So I’ve never really developed into being a great guitarist or a pianist or anything like that, because I feel like I know enough to get the song across, for better or worse. So it’s kind of punk rock, in a way, where it’s just a very D.I.Y. approach. I was never taught any of this. I didn’t take lessons. I sing the way I sing because I sang along with people whose voices I liked, and I think we all pick up little flavors from our influences. So you’ll hear everything from a little bit of Bowie to a little bit of Michael Hutchence to a little bit of Neil Diamond to a little bit of The Sisters of Mercy. All these things that have struck chords throughout my life are going to come through in what I do.
Many people grow up thinking they want to be a rock star, but they don’t actually have the ability or the talent. So when did you realize you actually did have that?
ASHTON NYTE: I think in my heart I knew. My very first impromptu performance was to an unsuspecting second grade class. I think I was singing to myself, and the teacher was trying to do one of those, “Well, why don’t you get up here and sing that for the whole class?” Thinking they were putting me in my place. And I thought that they really wanted me to, so I got up and I sang an Elvis Presley song, “Blue Suede Shoes.” It was a captive audience, but they responded really well. So always in the back of my mind, I thought that I could probably do this, despite being discouraged by all the powers that be, and despite having all these obstacles, and living in this place that’s far away from England and America where everything happens. And actually, there’s something that happens when you’re not part of the big thing. I think you actually try that much harder because you’re comparing yourself with the very best in the world. That’s your perception. When I would watch people like Bowie or the many artists that I’ve been in inspired by, that’s what I was aspiring to be. It wasn’t the local band. So when I got a little band together as The Awakening and we started playing, even in our hometown, people often assumed we were from somewhere else, because there was this different approach. You’re just trying that much harder. I just know that that separatism that was enforced upon me ended up being a huge catalyst for chasing it down as hard as I could. That still drives me: the fact that that’s where I came from, and the songs were written in a tiny bedroom in Johannesburg, and if things didn’t get any better, I’d probably have to go back and get a real job – and that terrified me. I studied architecture, and I hated it. And as soon as I had a number one [song] on the radio, I put it all away, the obligation to be tied to a more conventional path, and I just celebrated the path that was opening up in front of me, and just kept going for it.
What do you think about the legacy that you’ve created so far with your career?
ASHTON NYTE: I feel very fortunate that I’ve been able to do it. Legacy is a tricky word. I’ve seen people buy into that: “Oh, my legacy.” Kind of making an altar to themselves while they’re still around, and I definitely don’t want to do that. I’d like to think of it in terms of work done well. In terms of, I really did try with everything. I put myself out there. I wrote the best songs I could write, and performed them as well as I possibly could. I’m successful in the sense that I continue to get to do this. Fortunate that I can write songs, and people will come and hear me sing them, and that’s wonderful. To me, that’s success.
8 July – Bielefeld, Germany – Movie
9 July – Berlin, Germany – Maschinenhaus
10 July – Leipzig, Germany – Naumann’s Tanzlokal
11 July – Bolków, Poland – Castle Party Festival
12 Sep – Los Angeles, CA, USA – Lodge Room (Glōm Fest)
13 Sep – San Francisco, CA, USA – DNA Lounge (Glōm Fest)
19 Sep – Portland, OR, USA – Star Theater (Glōm Fest)
20 Sep – Vancouver, BC, Canada – The Cobalt (Glōm Fest)
24 Oct – Leeds, UK – Belgrave Music Hall
26 Oct – London, UK – Bush Hall
29 Oct – Angers, France – Joker’s Club (Ashton Nyte solo acoustic)
30 Oct – Angers, France – Le Chabada
31 Oct – Paris, France – TBA
1 Nov – Stuttgart, Germany – MS Wilhelma
2 Nov – Karlsruhe, Germany – KOHI Kulturraum
3 Nov – Hanover, Germany – Café Glocksee
4 Nov – Hamburg, Germany – Nochtspeicher
5 Nov – Cologne, Germany – Yard Club (Die Kantine)
6 Nov – Dortmund, Germany – Pauluskirche (full band acoustic)
7 Nov – Apeldoorn, The Netherlands – Brainstorm Festival
8 Nov – Apeldoorn, The Netherlands – Brainstorm Festival (full band acoustic)
