Hausu Mountain HHV Records 19 Items

Body Meπa is the New York-based quartet of Greg Fox (drums), Sasha Frere-Jones (guitar), Melvin Gibbs (bass), and Grey McMurray (guitar). As luminaries in the intersecting traditions of improvised music, rock, jazz, fusion, and contemporary classical music, the four artists have each spent decades building diverse practices that extend beyond sound into multiple disciplines. Prayer in Dub, their second release on Hausu Mountain, follows the band’s 2020 album The Work Is Slow. The album presents a band whose collective intuition as instrumentalists and live-in-the-room songwriters has deepened with each take that they put to tape.
 
Prayer in Dub finds Body Meπa taking up new experiments with song structure and atmosphere, fanning out into a wide menu of both longer and more concise pieces that suggest deliberate shifts in energy and emotional resonance. The album presents a thrilling contrast between storms of precise rhythmic interplay and slowly expanding fields of multi-guitar and bass texture, alternately pushing the narrative toward explosive peaks of intensity and dipping into ambient expanses. Contemplative guitar lines, both bone dry and effected into total abstraction, ripple together over dub-indebted rhythm section grooves before shifting the dial towards beatific twang. Knotty distorted solos surge out of the fray over networks of arpeggios and drum fills.

On Prayer in Dub, Body Meπa pursues a strain of euphoria charged with elegiac grandeur and the looming potential to crumble at any moment under the psychic weight of confusion. It speaks to the band’s goals and general outlook that chaos never completely consumes their sessions. The band channels the kinetic energy of a “supergroup” of veteran musicians into communal works that evolve beyond their creators’ extensive pedigrees into new forms both intimate in sentiment and majestic in scope.

Body Meπa is the New York-based quartet of Greg Fox (drums), Sasha Frere-Jones (guitar), Melvin Gibbs (bass), and Grey McMurray (guitar). As luminaries in the intersecting traditions of improvised music, rock, jazz, fusion, and contemporary classical music, the four artists have each spent decades building diverse practices that extend beyond sound into multiple disciplines. Prayer in Dub, their second release on Hausu Mountain, follows the band’s 2020 album The Work Is Slow. The album presents a band whose collective intuition as instrumentalists and live-in-the-room songwriters has deepened with each take that they put to tape.
 
Prayer in Dub finds Body Meπa taking up new experiments with song structure and atmosphere, fanning out into a wide menu of both longer and more concise pieces that suggest deliberate shifts in energy and emotional resonance. The album presents a thrilling contrast between storms of precise rhythmic interplay and slowly expanding fields of multi-guitar and bass texture, alternately pushing the narrative toward explosive peaks of intensity and dipping into ambient expanses. Contemplative guitar lines, both bone dry and effected into total abstraction, ripple together over dub-indebted rhythm section grooves before shifting the dial towards beatific twang. Knotty distorted solos surge out of the fray over networks of arpeggios and drum fills.

On Prayer in Dub, Body Meπa pursues a strain of euphoria charged with elegiac grandeur and the looming potential to crumble at any moment under the psychic weight of confusion. It speaks to the band’s goals and general outlook that chaos never completely consumes their sessions. The band channels the kinetic energy of a “supergroup” of veteran musicians into communal works that evolve beyond their creators’ extensive pedigrees into new forms both intimate in sentiment and majestic in scope.

Over the last decade, M. Geddes Gengras has released an enormous catalog of wide-ranging, synth-focused music in both solo and collaborative settings. He has participated in influential experimental groups like Sun Araw, Pocahaunted, Robedoor, and Akron/Family. Expressed, I Noticed Silence, Gengras’s third release on Hausu Mountain, exemplifies Gengras’s penchant for constant self-reinvention and genre-defiant exploration within a catalog whose every release carries his essence as a composer and synthesist while surging forward into new ideas and territories. With Gengras’s slowly unfurling ambient landscapes and his signature approach to rhythms animated by cyclical basslines and the layering of high-definition synth voices, Expressed, I Noticed Silence builds on the precedents set by his recent output while digging deeper into melodic sculpting and lush harmonic architectures than ever before. The presence of Gengras’s brother Cyrus Gengras (who has worked with artists like Kevin Morby, Amen Dunes, and Jessica Pratt) on electric guitar, casting off glistening lead melodies and webs of clean-toned arpeggios, cements the connection to the delay-drenched guitar work of precedents like Manuel Göttsching and Robert Fripp. The album’s zoned atmospheres and slow-building tiers of synth call to mind the interplanetary explorations of astral electronic music composers like Klaus Schulze, Michael Stearns, and John Serrie. More than anything in Gengras’s recent catalog, Expressed, I Noticed Silence continues along the arc of more modern post-kosmiche contemporaries including Emeralds, Bitchin Bajas, and Hausu Mountain label-mate Pulse Emitter. The album testifies to M. Geddes Gengras’s skill not only as a sculptor of tone and texture, but as a storyteller in the medium of electronic music — using the tools at his disposal to conjure complex moods and emotional spaces that lay out vistas looking across zones that approach the distant horizon.

Composer / saxophonist / multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bernstein has been an essential part of the Baltimore experimental music scene as a member of avant-rock champions Horse Lords, a frequent collaborator with acts like Dan Deacon and Matmos, and an erstwhile member of the High Zero Collective – Baltimore's premier experimental music presenter. Based in Baltimore for much of the last two decades, he currently resides with his family in Germany. Under his own name, Bernstein composes music focused on the material of sound, typically oriented around the tuning system of just intonation: the selection of notes based on the physical properties of sound which yields frequencies that provide more "perfect" harmonies outside of the capabilities of the 12-tone scales that appear in Western music in idioms ranging from classical / orchestral composition, to mainstream pop, and most everything in between. Bernstein's work can swell into flights of virtuosic sheets-of-sound overload or stretch individual tones into time-dilating durational exercises that emphasize the relationships between overtones and explore the unique harmonic series that he lays out for each piece. Andrew Bernstein returns to Hausu Mountain with a new album called a presentation. Oriented around his long-form, layered saxophone performances and presented with occasional drone-based accompaniment from electronic sound sources, the album finds the artist pushing the limits of both his compositional ideas and the physical reality of his craft. The result proves just as spellbinding as Bernstein's work on the more rhythmically busy side of the spectrum, showcasing his patience as a composer, his deep tutelage in the properties of overtones and microtonal harmonies, and the improbable precision with which he can produce sounds from his saxophone - an instrument not necessarily designed to easily achieve these specific frequencies / pitches - in order to match the ideas in his head.

Erica Eso is a Brooklyn and Kingston, NY-based project led by composer / vocalist / producer Weston Minissali. Minissali has participated in New York’s music scene for more than decade as a member of projects like avant-rock post-pop band Cloud Becomes Your Hand and chimeric musique concrète experimentalists VaVatican, while his work at the head of Erica Eso has manifested with varied ensembles on albums including 2019 and 129 Dreamless GMG. Minissali’s music under the Erica Eso banner fuses compositional strategies of the avant garde, including the use of microtonal note voicings and advanced synthesis, with songwriting in the vein of art pop. His lush, tightly structured songs teem with melismatic topline melodies, layered vocal harmonies, and fast-shifting narrative arcs, all built over a sturdy instrumental foundation. 192, the first Erica Eso release with Hausu Mountain, captures the project in the quintet formation that solidified in 2017 and rigorously rehearsed in the years that followed. Their recordings and the live shows from this period, which culminated in their final performance in this configuration in October of 2019, document the music of Erica Eso at a peak of live band complexity and near telepathic collaborative energy, giving life to Minissali’s music with a more solidified ensemble of hands and voices than ever before. In his attempt to balance pop tradition with experimentation, Minissali fills 192 with songs that work as much on the level of instinctive heartstring-tugging grandeur as armchair analysis. Listeners can lose themselves in the mosaic of pulsating synth tones and try to trace the sprawling structural maps that each song lays out, or full-on melt when confronted with those lead melodies and vocal harmonies.

Chicago-based producer Mike Meegan records music under the moniker RXM Reality. Meegan’s three previous albums on Hausu Mountain sketch out an evolving trajectory of omni-electronic rhythmic music that warps elements of grime, dubstep, mutated techno, hyperpop, and noise into unpredictable compositions overloaded with synthetic textures and fast-scrolling beat structures. With the new album sick for you, Meegan pushes the RXM Reality project into brand new zones along multiple intersecting spectrums. For the first time, he incorporates his voice into his work, employing a series of contrasting vocal styles that complement productions which shine with more finely-crafted details and narrative hairpin turns than ever before. The album feels more progressive and overwhelming than any prior output with its pointillistic beat mosaics and melodic arrangements, taking a few steps closer to some vision of contemporary pop music soaked in adrenaline and ballistic energy. RXM Reality’s production thrives on drama, conveyed in mammoth bursts of overlapped drum elements planted over quick-cycling snippets of software synthesis and Midi guitar. The percussive contours and chest-beating energies of sick for you can sound at times like festival-ready EDM or dubstep (even “brostep”) refracted through a funhouse mirror, maintaining a sense of swaggering confidence and bombast even as shards of disembodied beats and synths melt into putty around the edges of the mix.

150 Gr Vinyl With Insert

Underground hip-hop wild card Sharkula has carved himself into the grain of the Chicago underground through 20 years of determined grinding. He records his free-associative verses over a wide spectrum of scene-sourced beats and has built a catalog of over 40 individual albums that he wraps in his own distinctive hand-drawn packaging. Sharkula approaches the spontaneous construction of a verse from the perspective of an improviser, and recorded every track that appears on Take Caution on the Beach as a single unbroken vocal take. HausMo co-founder Mukqs’s production keeps one foot in the beat architectures and regimented structures of boom-bap hip hop, while continuing his exploration of the potential of 16-bit video game music. Although the specter of the COVID-19 pandemic rears its head in moments of Sharkula’s freestyle verses his overall message remains grounded in positivity, shining a light to combat any existential darkness that bears down on us.

Angel Marcloid’s recordings as Nonlocal Forecast focus the trajectory of a vast catalog squarely in the realm of retro Weather Channel-inspired smooth jazz fusion, intricate prog, and expansive new age experiments. Trading off a measure of the typically overloaded compositional style found in other projects to favor lush atmospheres and relatively pared down arrangements, Marcloid populates Nonlocal Forecast pieces with progressive keyboard and synth harmonies, complex drum programming, and majestic leads performed on guitar, keyboards, and guests’ saxophones. The project runs alongside the omni-combinatory works of the flagship project Fire-Toolz and many other monikers including the vapor-focused works of Mindspring Memories. Holographic Universe(s?)!, the second Nonlocal Forecast full-length and the first to be released on vinyl, follows Bubble Universe! with a cycle of songs that elevates Marcloid’s grandiose compositions to previously undiscovered heights, while packing the music with dramatic shifts that allow it to journey off into dynamic new directions.

Quicksails’ approach on Blue Rise foregrounds his palette of modular and digital synthesizers, resulting in a strain of music that brims with shimmering textures and lush, layered harmonies. More than a full-on pivot to another style, Quicksails enters into a mode of production that highlights his melodic sensibilities and his ear for sophisticated DAW-based composition. Each track unfolds as a self-contained world replete with fluctuating tiers of fine-grain synth-tones that morph as they stack together into systems of polyrhythmic activity or smear into all-consuming drift. Quicksails lays out a menu of contrasting sentimental spaces and self-contained sonic tableaus, each of which refracts the sun’s light out across new terrains. Blue Rise cements Quicksails not only as a master synthesist and arranger of far-flung sound sources, but as a composer attuned to the time dilating properties and the instantaneous emotional impacts of the zones that he lays out before us.

The full scope of his wide-ranging experiments in synthesis and electronic arrangement encompasses everything from expansive new age drift exercises, to purely textural noise sculpting, to the strain of post-Berlin School cybernetic prog composition that characterized newer albums like Through The Portal (Phinery, 2016) and Digital Rainforest (Beer on the Rug, 2015). Swirlings, his frst full-length LP on Hausu Mountain, follows a split release with Brett Naucke (HAUSMO53, 2017), and albums on labels like Immune, NNA, and Constellation Tatsu. Swirlings fnds Pulse Emitter tempering his more recent melodic streak with a host of time-distorting compositional strategies from the ambient and drone traditions, yielding a hybridized vision of his music that spans distinct eras and styles of his output. Taken in the context of his cosmic song titles and long-standing incorporation of sci-f themes and imagery, the album bears the outward signs of the ambient record that seeks to evoke the experience of deep space travel, or observing a lush garden of alien fora from the deck of a starship. Groetsch orna- ments his gorgeous harmonic whirlpools and majestic spreads of smeared drones with layers of crystalline melody and fourishes of granular processing. His pieces stretch through minimal expans- es in which individual pads and bass notes sketch out a churning rhythmic grid before blooming into mosaics of interlaced arpeggios and lead voices. Pulse Emitter approaches electronic composition from the perspective of a master craftsman, harnessing a fne-tuned sense of narrative development and a penchant for juxtaposing contrasting synth voices from far-fung corners of his arsenal of softsynths, app-based programs, and hardware instruments. While he conjures time-lapse vistas of galaxies and nebulas in our mind's eye, the sophistication of his arrangements and the universal beauty of his harmonies pushes the lens inward on the self, result- ing in a journey that is as personal and internal as it is celestial. Doug & Max HausuMountain @gmail.com 847-220-1755 Artist: Pulse Emitter Album: Swirlings Label: Hausu Mountain LPx above / LP below Cat#: HAUSMO92 Formats:LPx(colored), LP(black) Release Date: 01/17/20 (click album art to stream) Portland-based composer Daryl Groetsch's output under the name Pulse Emitter forms a catalog of nearly one hundred physical releases since the early '00s. Swirlings represents a culmination of diverse modes of creation that Pulse Emitter has developed over the course of his recent releases. As on 2018's Xenharmonic Passages, Groetsch moves beyond traditional tonalities and western scales to incorporate elements of microtonality into his percolating black hole soundscapes. As on his fve volume series called Meditative Music, he hones in on 6 to 7-minute drifting pieces that balance a sense of delicate stasis with great depth of detail and movement. The lead lines present on Swirlings continue Pulse Emitter's fascination with emulated instrumental tones characteristic of '80s synth composition, as more chintzy or brittle voices collide with patches of ultra high-fdelity synthetic pointillism. Far from the realm of plug-andpress-play ambient computer music, his hands-on input on his system of machines can compress time into pockets of acute structural turbulence, or lock into streams of slow equilibrium where one can trace his live manipulation of single voices or textural parameters. With Swirlings, Pulse Emitter taps into the benevolence and natural curiosity at the heart of his practice. After decades guiding us down a network of distinct paths through the cosmos, Groetsch has become the wise traveler that we turn to transfx and entertain us, to kindle a spark of warmth in the cold void of space.

Euglossine bridges the complex harmonies of jazz fusion, the ornate synth performances of library music, and the rapidly evolving sentimental resonances of video game music. While Coriolis paints Euglossine as a scholar who has pored over the diverse branches of 20th century progressive composition, the reality of his playing cuts through preconceptions of elitism or excess typically attributed to these musical traditions — perfecting the sense of raw beauty and wonder that lodge our favorite tunes in our long-term memories.

Fire-Toolz is one musical moniker used by a consciousness that has taken the physical form of a transfemme non-binary human named Angel Marcloid. Though her work fits under the wide umbrella of beat-focused electronic production, Fire-Toolz sculpts her tracks from warped signifiers of genres including jazz fusion, electro-industrial, new age, black metal, vaporwave, and noise improv. Far from a passing tourist cherry-picking the juiciest chunks of each of these traditions, Angel has worked through an improbably rigorous musical self-education that seems to compress several entire discrete lives into one: a teenage student of prog and metal, tracing the linear compositions of Rush and Dream Theater on drums, then guitar and bass, then keyboards; touring the country at the front of multiple emo bands before touring the country for years again under myriad monikers in the harsh noise circuit; falling headfirst into the internet abyss of mangled smooth jazz samples and ultra high-resolution sound design. Each of these skillsets and memories collide in the production of Skinless X-1, as sketches of knotty fusion complexity untangle themselves before our ears, only to melt seconds later into hard-panning clouds of alien texture or pads of angelic synth.

Chicago-based producer/composer Mike Meegan makes music under the moniker RXM Reality. Over the course of four albums on Hausu Mountain since 2018, Meegan refined a strain of electronic production that unites facets of breakcore, techno, grime, noise, and countless other styles into detailed composites that attest to his omnivorous tastes and bottomless technical acumen as a producer. While his live performances over the past few years and 2022’s Sick For You found him experimenting with his own lead vocals for the first time, pushing the dial somewhere closer to mutated-pop-music injected with distorted roars in the digital hardcore tradition, his new album No. 1 in the World (his fifth on HausMo) dives into the song-oriented branch of his work more than ever before. The album’s hour-long program spans twenty-four shorter tracks that highlight Meegan as the frontman and singer/songwriter of his own morphing one-person ensemble, without sacrificing any of the complex and unpredictable production decisions that animate his music. Acknowledging the influence of rock, punk, and pop music on his work, and embracing his desire to shine as a more legible human presence within his cybernetic-spreads of electronics, RXM Reality treats us to a vision of his music equally focused on concise songcraft and ballistic rave energy, all the while pushing his sound into a state of mind-bending total overload.

As RXM Reality cherrypicks and recombines signifiers from a deep history of experimental electronic vocabularies, one might worry that Meegan’s production runs the risk of collapsing under its own weight, yet it speaks to his experience as a producer that every juxtaposed element hits the mix with a stunning degree of clarity and separation. No. 1 isegues through far-flung genres and styles without ever losing a sense of cohesion, rooted in Meegan’s palpable presence at the center of each track.

BBsitters Club is a rock band based in Chicago that features Doug Kaplan and Charlie Olvera on guitar and vocals, Max Allison on bass, and Paul Birhanu on drums. As the label’s de-facto in-haus band, BBsitters Club satisfies Hausu Mountain co-founders Allison and Kaplan’s urge to remain connected to the rock and roll music they grew up loving and playing — far across the spectrum from the experimental electronics featured on the lion’s share of HausMo releases.A solid four years after the one-two-punch releases of BBsitters Club & Party, the band’s 2020 debut studio album, and Joel’s Pick’s Vol. 1, the first volume in a series of audience-recorded live takes from shows around Chicago, we find the BBs reviving the Joel’s Pick’s series with Vol. 2. Charged with the energy of a close-knit group of friends willing to follow along with each other’s most outlandish ideas both in composition and live performance, JPV2 offers us a bewildering yet always tongue-in-cheek palette of ideas cherry-picked and mashed together into amalgams that both embrace “rock traditions” and defy them with a cherubic grin. BBsitters Club’s amorphous compositions land somewhere between the world’s most baked prog band and a jamband that’s never content to lapse into wheel-spinning complacency. On JPV2, BBsitters Club cartwheel between eras and styles of rock music with abandon — a TV stuck flipping channels after your dad falls asleep with one leg on the remote. We encounter the elliptical dueling guitars and autumnal atmospheres of midwest emo / math rock, the gregarious stomp of electrified country rock, blues rock that has melted from ingesting one too many hallucinogens, and fried Devo-style art punk that breaches into the realms of ska before melting into free-form noise rock flecked with the bizarro imitative instrument tones of Kaplan’s MIDI guitar.

Hausu Mountain continues the HausLive series of live show recordings that capture some of the headiest moments in Chicago underground music with a pair of Chi-town gigs from Kent, Ohio’s legendary carnival-core-free-jazz-noise duo Moth Cock — compiled together into HausLive 3: Chicago Twofer. The series channels the spirit of the informal bootlegging and tape trading of audience recordings as pioneered by the community surrounding the Grateful Dead, honing in on the raw live energy and in-the-moment emotions that make each show stand out in the stream of time. Selected as part of the label’s ongoing collaboration with the prolific Chicago taper and HausMo mega-friend Joel Berk, HausLive 3: Chicago Twofer documents two of Moth Cock’s sets at beloved DIY spaces in Chicago in 2023: one in May at Not Not, and another in December at DADS. Presented as a single release with two 40+ minute sets, HausLive 3: Chicago Twofer continues Moth Cock’s streak of continual evolution as an unpredictable live act whose loosely structured improvisations spiral off into confounding zones capable of inducing the deepest altered states of mind and body.

Brought to life by the Moth Cock’s stripped down rig of drum machine, guitar pedals, microphones, saxophone, and trumpet, the music captured on HausLive 3 completely defies the humble physical reality of its origin and blasts into the outer reaches of brain-scrambling electro-acoustic noise improv. Always delivered with a wink, or even the full-on grimace of a mutated clown, the duo’s music rejects notions of noise performance as an outlet for aggression or aural violence in favor of a sense of cartoonish whimsy and gonzo tomfoolery.

d'Eon is Montreal-based composer / producer Chris d’Eon. Since beginning his musical practice in the 2000s, his unclassifiable catalog has presented us with baroque keyboard performances, digital chamber music, hi-definition beatmaking in the pop and R&B idioms, glitchy abstractions composed with chance operations and digital hyper-fragmentation tactics, and all manner of experiments that attest to his drive to reach the outer limits of eclectic composition. d’Eon is perhaps best known for his releases on the dearly missed experimental electronic label Hippos in Tanks, including a split EP with Grimes called Darkbloom in 2011, which planted his post-classical minimalist works along an influential cultural spectrum with labelmates like James Ferraro, Arca, Dean Blunt, Laurel Halo, and Oneohtrix Point Never. Leviathan, d’Eon’s second HausMo release, follows Rhododendron (2021), continuing his triumphant return to pressing music on physical formats.

It’s hard to pin down exactly what makes a melody reach listeners with a sentimental quality, yet d’Eon channels his instincts as a composer and his breadth of knowledge in music theory and harmony to nail this exact feeling time after time on Leviathan. His penchant for re-interpolating motifs in multiple pieces and his deliberation in sequencing his compositions into a diverse overarching flow imbue his digital chamber music with a holistic narrative quality, creating a multi-movement program of cohesive classical works as much as an album of electronic music.

d'Eon's music has long touched on religious themes. Leviathan shies away from overt religious or philosophical gravity, retreating instead into the realm of personal listening music. During the time of the bubonic plague in Europe, music was expanding out from strictly liturgical venues and into the home — music neither for worship nor for dancing in public. It is in this way that d'Eon's electronic compositions are not sacred, nor are they dance music.

7 inch Vinyl