Side-by-Side: Hausu Mountain’s Narf Guzz Batch

Tapes! My inner Donald Trump would say that like every movement grounded in democracy, there comes a time when maybe too many people have a voice; there are too many artists, there are too many bands, with too few ideas, united under too similar of an ideology: find object with strings, strum, make it big. Find macbook, steal ableton, teach yourself the difference between jungle and dnb, smoke mad weed, wake up mad late, get mad at your boss, who is mad at you, for being so mad when he tells you what to do. But wait! My inner Bernie Sanders is saying that this is where all great ideas begin, and it’s time for the mad weeders and memers to turn their attention to the “narf guzz batch” from Chicago’s own Hausu Mountain.

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If you put em in alphabetical order, the first up in the new Hausu batch comes from noise scene vets BANG! BROS. A fantastical romp through clatter and clutter, Food For Thoth follows in the tradition of ecstatic free noise like later Coltrane, Throbbing Gristle, or my personal fave, the speed-vaporwave of Cream Juice. Two parts drum machine mangling, one part sax manipulating, Food for Thoth is initially strangled with alternating directions, simultaneously deploying swing band samples and heavy tempo-knobbed, quantized blips while bursts of tenor sax steer the monster from wall to wall. Just when you’re about to climb them, the walls do back off into something understandable and more drum-machiney, forming cohesive moments of Lounge Lizard-esque jazz sleaze.

The fascinating thing about effective tape labels is how they keep a cohesive aesthetic, and the folks at Hausu seem to succeed in keeping their releases devoted to colorful, low-fi pastiche. Noise is easily dark, but this batch and much of the Hausu material I’ve had the chance to absorb tend to be on the sunny side of the color wheel. BANG! BROS. is playfully chaotic, not malignantly so, which seems to reflect the label-head’s personalities, as best as I can tell; weedily jolly.

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A slightly scarier tape, Cables, by Davey Harms, previously known as Mincemeat or Ten Speed, is a distorted and conceptually danceable album. Where it is and isn’t danceable is something of the trick here. Though level, Cables seems to ride the gain on beats to the point of drowning the track, and in that drowning pool we find something to focus on and something else to feel, harmonically. After the first tracks pound into the tape, another playful weed monster of a beat track called “American Raw” switches up the vibe and cascades left and right in your headphones, eventually taken over by a sort of “fat” noise, if you will, the vibe of which keeps up for the rest of the tape. “Island Rind” ends it, starting off playfully menacing until it commits to real menace, somehow switching from a goofball dubby feel to something like the first Gatekeeper record.

Though it’s hard to tell if they’re cheap sounds or higher quality ones put through cheap pedals, there’s a high quality of cheapness about it. Davey Harms succeeds at making good production while making fun of overproduction; the album pulses and hits hard but it doesn’t feel like he stayed up all night EQ-ing kicks and snares for the millionth time.

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The odd-man out of the group, and, upon further reflection, the way scarier Denying The Other begins with a long sample of a child reading what I believe is a passage from The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. The kid’s pretty good at reading, though he falters a bit, and after a little while takes on a crazy echo and trips me right the fuck out before co-mingling with a ten minute long downward plunge of synth fanfare. From then on it gets real damned edgy.

Compared to the other two releases, the darks of Radiator Greys are real dark, and the tape is fairly unpleasant to experience, in a good way, of course. It’s not a quality comparison as such, but if Davey Harms and Bang Bros. are weed, Radiator Greys is acid. I hope I’m right here and not so acid damaged that everything resembling the vibe raises the white flag. Maybe Radiator Greys has nice intentions.

Nope. Track 3, “Existing In A Room,” is beat-driven and full of those pink charging pig monsters from Doom. Track 4, “Wait,” gives a little bit of hope with a nice major chord and I wait to see if it’ll be nice, but I’m quickly assaulted by the kind of machine gun I’d use to kill the pig monsters in doom. The guns give way to a more pleasant ambience and play a game of cat and mouse with the rest of the track, which is less sold on defining its nature as amiable or otherwise. The terrifically named “Cocksure on the Chopping Block” finishes off the album in a suitably intense way, and really affirms my suspicions that this is a scary album with some actual screams.

Oh fuckin’ boy, Denying The Other is a very transportative and totally uncomfortable headphone listen and now that it’s dark out, the bedroom light seems to have that tinge of crazy to it that we all know and have various levels of comfort with. Thanks a lot, Hausu Mountain for making me need a quick Seinfeld marathon. Aside from their obvious quality, the tapes are also very cool looking, and worth purchasing on February 12th, when they’ll be released.