This article compares two underground music movements that used creative communication to attract followers while concealing their activities: Genesis P-Orridge's chaos magick group Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth and its musical outlet Psychic TV (1981–1991), and the internet-based electronic micro-genre witch house (2008–2013). Although they appear aesthetically and operationally aligned, examining their occult purposes reveals an exploitative dynamic: witch house adopts the style of the Psychic TV/TOPY project but simultaneously undermines the ritual-based "cultural engineering" that originally defined it.
Between 1981 and 1991, the band Psychic TV acted as the audio-visual propaganda arm of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY), an international occult network designed by Genesis P-Orridge to resemble a militant youth movement. This essay examines how P-Orridge, Psychic TV, and TOPY conducted a deliberate campaign of occult research to test whether chaos magick rituals could generate the widespread belief that P-Orridge and followers pioneered the UK acid house movement. Primary sources, including Psychic TV's compilation albums with pseudonymous artist names, show that acid house's trademark psychedelia became a means of recruiting listeners into these occult experiments.