How Chicago Label Hausu Mountain Became a Home for Oddball Experimentalism

 

      Graphic by Drew Litowitz

Defined by carnivalesque sonics and a kaleidoscopic visual aesthetic, the label is proving that outré music doesn’t have to be serious all of the time.

By Philip Sherburne

Hausu Mountain has released a staggering array of music in the nine years since the label was founded: longform drone and lysergic easy listening; slow-motion techno and blown-out breakcore; hymns to the Weather Channel and fingerpicked Americana; mutant gabber-screamo and whatever the hell you call the music of Ohio duo Moth Cock. For all its range, though, the label’s guiding aesthetic is easy to describe. “We like gaudy, trippy, rainbow stuff,” says label co-founder Maxwell Allison. His partner, Doug Kaplan, chimes in: “We like ignoring ideas about what’s cool or what’s cheesy—collapsing high and low culture and seeing them all as one thing. There’s very little irony happening on the label. Everything is out of honesty and love.”

Zooming in from their respective Chicago apartments, they make for a somewhat unlikely pair on screen. Allison, bearded and ponytailed, wears all black, with tattoos on his knuckles and another peeking out from beneath the collar of his T-shirt. Kaplan, in a long-sleeve Grateful Dead tie-dye, could pass for a camp counselor. But it’s quickly apparent that they’re the kind of team who know each other well enough to finish each other’s sentences, which they frequently do.

Allison and Kaplan grew up in the Chicago suburbs, then met at Northwestern University, just north of the city. They played in bands and did radio shows together, and lived as roommates. The label was born to fill a practical need: Their band Good Willsmith needed merch to sell at gigs. Kaplan already had some experience from working in shipping at Chicago indie institution Thrill Jockey. Taking cues from the cassette labels of the Midwestern noise scene—ultra-underground outfits like Hanson and Pizza Night—they decided to give it a go.

At first, Hausu Mountain focused mainly on their own projects. Then, gradually, they began to fill out their roster with like-minded souls they encountered on tour. “In a lot of ways, the label can be seen as a biography of our friendships and travels,” says Kaplan. Even in the few cases where they’ve released music off a demo, Allison adds, “We’ve ended up becoming close friends with those people after the fact. That’s our model: being friends with someone and knowing them personally and repping them fully, in a way that goes beyond just grabbing at whatever we like. It has more of a family aspect.”

The label’s name is a portmanteau paying tribute to director Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s 1977 cult horror film Hausu and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 psychedelic epic The Holy Mountain, both stoner classics that served as formative viewing when the two were in college. “We saw both of these films as cinematic versions of the sorts of worlds we were aspiring to convey with the music on the label: the balance of genre-bending experimentalism with raucous fun,” Kaplan says.

Ultimately, it’s this balance that best defines Hausu Mountain, far more than any sound or musical style. “We want to have music that toes the line between being heady and celebratory,” Kaplan adds. Allison chimes in: “I kind of make fun of our label by saying it’s like circus music, but that’s an instructive example for what we do. A carnival is an extremely fun and bizarre place that can manifest in wonder or surprise, but also [encompasses] people’s weird, deep-seated fears.”

That duality extends to the label’s eye-catching sleeves. Often designed by Allison, these covers offer the perfect foil for the mind-bending sonics within: a kaleidoscopic riot of bright colors, pixelated video-game stills, and occasionally nightmarish imagery. The visual continuity was influenced by Ralph Records, run by the infamous San Francisco avant-garde group the Residents. “We took them as the model for an artist-run label that has a unique and diverse stable that they work with over and over,” Kaplan says. “There’s a sense of humor and a personality to it.” Another crucial aspect of Ralph Records’ ethos: “They always operated under the assumption that they were kind of a major label, even though they were this tiny thing. They treated it like it was a really big deal, which is something we’ve always tried to do too.”

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The Incomprehensible Exemplar: Moth Cock’s Twofer Tuesday (2014)

Kent, Ohio’s Moth Cock were the first band that Hausu Mountain worked with outside of Allison and Kaplan’s own projects. “They’re probably the most accurate representation of the Hausu Mountain sound,” says Kaplan. “It’s completely prog, completely shred.” Released in 2014, Twofer Tuesday is the band’s second offering for the label, boasting two side-long descents into loop-pedal delirium. “Moth Cock is my favorite band that exists in the world,” gushes Allison. “Every single time I’ve seen them play live, it has inspired and baffled and stunned me. Part of their appeal is their humble, homespun practice, which barely uses any gear—it’s two pedals, a trumpet, sax or clarinet, and microphone. But it’s extremely charged with personality and weird ideas. The results that they wring out of that are truly beyond comprehension.”

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The Breakthrough: Eartheater’s Metalepsis (2015)

Allison and Kaplan met Eartheater, aka New Yorker Alexandra Drewchin, when her band Guardian Alien played a DIY show in Chicago. The three became friends, and Drewchin completed a solo album for the label, but Allison and Kaplan pulled the plug on the project at the last minute. “It was more rock or indie,” recalls Kaplan. “I like it a lot; it’s very good music. But that drone part of the equation was missing. It didn’t feel quite right.” So the trio worked on a new project for a year and a half, resulting in 2015’s Metalepsis, a breakthrough for the label. “It really felt like the first time that we were taken seriously by a lot of people,” Kaplan adds. “We had been releasing so much one-take ambient or noise music, and then this person from that world suddenly has an album of gorgeous, spectral, angelic pop,” Allison says. “That laid the groundwork for the idea of working with tons of other more song-oriented artists. It was like, ‘We can do this. This is part of our identity now.’ So we owe her a lot, for sure.”

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The Master Improvisation: TALSounds’ All the Way (2015)

Allison and Kaplan met Natalie Chami shortly after graduating college and began playing with her in their band Good Willsmith. At the same time, she kept up her solo project TALsounds, making loop-based improv at her residency in a small Chicago bar. “It’s hard to fathom how much she puts into her compositions, all the different elements. And it’s all live using loop pedals, no computer,” says Allison. “All the Way demonstrates that her approach to song-building can happen on-the-spot and be so sophisticated. She is a genius-level worker. She has put so much into this practice.”

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The Crazy Future Shit: Fire-Toolz’s Skinless X-1 (2018)

Allison and Kaplan knew Angel Marcloid as a noise musician on the local DIY scene. Then they saw a video that paired an image of the artist (under her alias Fire-Toolz) screaming with vintage NES game footage. “We’re just like, ‘What the fuck? This is Angel?’” recalls Allison. In 2017, they released Fire-Toolz’s Drip Mental, which slalomed between screamo and vaporwave, then followed it up in 2018 with Skinless X-1, where Marcloid smoothed out her customary stylistic whiplash by heaping on new age and fusion. “She immediately became a very important artist for our label,” Allison says. “Her music is absolutely unique, one-of-a-kind, crazy future shit.” Kaplan adds, “There’s no artist we’ve worked with that has a better idea of what their vision is. Angel is usually a couple steps ahead of us. She actually might be the label boss and not us.”

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The Contemplative Carnival: Dustin Wong’s Fluid World Building 101 With Shaman Bambu (2018)

Both Allison and Kaplan were longtimes fans of Dustin Wong, who was once the guitarist in experimental rock band Ponytail and has since released several solo albums on Thrill Jockey. “This one speaks to us very deeply,” says Kaplan. “Both of us have a heavy rock background, and it’s cool that this is a guitar-centric album but still totally HausMo, carnival-core all over the place.”

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The Gonzo Endurance Test: Pepper Mill Rondo’s E.D.M. (2018)

In a catalog that hardly lacks for batshit propositions, Kaplan and Allison’s work as Pepper Mill Rondo probably takes the guano cake. A 100-minute endurance test of inside jokes, karaoke performances, and moments of genuine brilliance (e.g. “I’m sitting in a room,” a tribute to Alvin Lucier’s magnum opus of conceptual sound art made out of millisecond-long pop samples), it takes the art-prank plunderphonics of Negativland and raises them to the galaxy-brain level. “It’s a vaporwave-adjacent thing that rejects vaporwave,” says Kaplan. (Hence “Lesser Artists Borrow, Great Artists Vape,” which collages together interview snippets about the contested subgenre with commercials for vape pens.) He likens the experience of listening to it to a kind of ego death: “It’s about going into the zone and getting overwhelmed and staying in there for a long time. If you’re going to listen to these crazy samples for 100 minutes, by the end, you’ll be pretty nullified.”

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The Mutant Jock Jam: Prolaps’ Pure Mud Volume 7 (2020)

Hausu Mountain put out a handful of tapes from Bonnie Baxter and her group Kill Alters before she teamed up with Machine Girl in the duo Prolaps, who mix rave, metal, hardcore, and industrial into a self-described “mutant” sound. “There’s a huge Jock Jams influence,” says Kaplan approvingly. “One of the things that makes this album really shine is that the heaviness and metal edge are balanced with a totally scatalogical sense of humor and meme-ishness. It’s super heavy and over the top, but it’s never scary or satanic or evil. It’s ‘evil’ in quotes, where they’re singing about buttholes.”

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The Off-the-Wall Hip-Hop Adventure: Sharkula x Mukqs’ Take Caution on the Beach (2021)

Chicago rapper Sharkula is a ubiquitous figure around town. For years, he’s been out in bars, on the sidewalk, on the Blue Line, selling his art and his music. “I’ve loved hip-hop since I was very young,” says Allison. “I always had the idea of wanting to make beats and be a producer, and Sharkula was an obvious choice to work with, because we have a great rapport. I definitely look up to him as someone that is a lifer in music.” All the vocals on this year’s Take Caution on the Beach were recorded in a single day. “It was like bringing in a lead soloist, but it just happened to be in his very idiosyncratic, off-the-wall rap style,” Allison adds. “His zest for life comes through in his music. He might have moments where he discusses his struggles or gets into more goofy, graphic, or scatalogical, but so many times, he’s talking about staying positive. It’s inspirational.”

Where to Begin With Important Records’ Genre-Defying Soundscapes

 

By Jonathan Williger

When John Brien founded Important Records in 2001, he was determined to establish a curatorial vision that reflected his experience working in record stores, where every section could yield unexpected bounty. The enormous stylistic gulf between the label’s first two releases—a 7” of ramshackle pop songs by Daniel Johnston and a characteristically corrosive collection of looped noise by Merzbow—set a standard for the striking aesthetic curveballs that would become the label’s signature. Twenty years and 500 releases in, the label has emerged as a bastion of boundless exploration, spanning crushing doom (Ocean), makeshift experimental electronics (Jessica Rylan), archaic lute compositions (Jozef Van Wissem), wispy drone (Bitchin Bajas), and more. “The goal,” Brien says, “was to be a genre and brand-free label that could really release anything.” 

Important’s first 10 years were defined by that defiant attitude as the label released dozens of albums that challenged various notions of genre conformity. While it had always been a major facet of the label’s constantly fluctuating sound, a definitive focus on long-form drone and avant-garde composition began to crystalize in the early ’10s, and Brien began to moderate the pace of new releases. “As my own listening and creative practice became more focused, the label did too,” he says. “I was releasing so many records, and it was a difficult pace to keep up. Slowing down helped that focus to occur naturally.” 

From the very beginning, Brien has focused not only on contemporary artists, but the broader lineage of musicians, thinkers, and composers to whom those experiments are indebted. In addition to the label’s fruitful relationship with Merzbow, early examples include a 2-CD collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky; new editions of rarely heard recordings by krautrock godfather Conrad Schnitzler and Kluster; and new works by the prominent sound artist Christina Kubisch. Brien has also mined the audio archives of several avant-garde legends, releasing expanded reissues and first editions of significant lost recordings from Pauline Oliveros and Eliane Radigue. There’s even a whole sub-label dedicated to sound sculptor Harry Bertoia. “The whole concept of an archive is attractive because it means I have a lot of work to do,” says Brien. “There’s this permanent, preserved, body of work to pick from. I’m going through it with an artist, or their family, to get their philosophy out into the world, and I like the security of knowing there is always more to do, more to explore.” 

As Important’s purview has become more focused, it has spawned offshoots for specific projects. In addition to the Bertoia-focused Sonambient label, Brien began releasing limited-run cassettes under the Cassauna banner, and the Saltern imprint has been established for releases curated by composer Tashi Wada, son of fluxus musician Yoshi Wada. Running through even a tenth of the label’s massive discography would require hundreds of hours of listening, so here’s an overview of several recent and classic releases that encapsulate Important’s lasting impact.

Jessica Ekomane
Multivocal

The two vertigo-inducing compositions on Multivocal, sound artist Jessica Ekomane’s debut album, unwind the strands of a single, polyphonic synthesizer pulse by imposing minute, phase-shifting tempo changes on glowing filaments of sound. The vivid, luminous tones are braided into deceptively simple patterns as they fall in and out of sync with each other, coalescing into improbable motifs that unravel as spontaneously as they intertwine. It would be reductive to say that Ekomane is updating the phasing techniques pioneered by Steve Reich for the 21st century; this music feels much more deliberate, physically resonant, and wholly immersive than anything Reich created.

Duane Pitre
Feel Free

Feel Free was released during that period in the early ‘10s when the label’s focus began to bend more and more towards long-form minimalism. Featuring a sextet of strings, harp, hammer dulcimer, guitar, and electronics, the piece is built around crystalline tones that chime out in indeterminate intervals left up to the players’ discretion, giving it an air of weightlessness and spontaneity. By the piece’s final section, the strings and electronics coalesce around a yawning open fifth, the dulcimer pounding out metallic tones on top of omnipresent drone.

Pauline Oliveros
Tara’s Room

Tara’s Room, originally released on cassette in 1987 and reissued on vinyl by Important in 2019, has never been considered one of Pauline Oliveros’ most influential releases, but it is a crucial document of the immense sensitivity and emotional depth the composer communicated with her music. The album’s two pieces are based around the use of the Expanded Instrument System, a series of tape loops (and eventually digital delay systems) that Oliveros used to “spacialize” the sound generated by her voice or accordion. The title track features flute, arhythmic percussion, and Oliveros’ hypnotic chanting, which gets layered into an increasingly dense, cacophonous cloud of sound. Enchanting and heartbreaking, “The Beauty of Sorrow” transforms the deeply human states of sadness and suffering into something that approaches spiritual transcendence. As she traces mournful melodies with her accordion, the sound is held in stasis by the tape delay—ghostly reflections that afford Oliveros the opportunity to remold the melancholy into something profound and beautiful.

Eleh
Radiant Intervals I

Eleh’s music is like the distant glow of a celestial body or the steady radiation of geothermal heat—it is perceived as nearly static, slowly emanating from some remote source. Composed and performed entirely using modular synthesizer, the four drone-based pieces on Radiant Intervals I move deliberately, almost imperceptibly, as the anonymous artist meticulously tunes different waveforms to generate pulses of sound that arise when two pure tones sit at very close intervals to one another. Despite the academic origins of the music, the listening experience is affectingly immersive, especially as massive throbs of bass give form to the spectral frequencies that float at the top of the auditory spectrum.

James Blackshaw
O True Believers

O True Believers, James Blackshaw’s 2006 debut for Important, is the first of many masterful releases the 12-string guitarist would put out on the label over a decade-long period. The album’s four compositions find common ground between Takoma-school American Primitive guitar soli, expansive psychedelia, and 20th century classical minimalism, showcasing Blackshaw’s spellbinding technicality as he produces dense, swirling patterns of resonant strings. He incorporates tamboura and autoharp on the labyrinthine centerpiece “The Elk With Jade Eyes” and subtle percussion and organ on the title track, but its when his 12-string is presented unadorned, overtones ringing out over the constant thrum of fingerpicking, that Blackshaw’s ability to transcend clichés of folk guitar are made manifest.

Diane Cluck
Macy’s Day Bird

Macy’s Day Bird is a collection of threadbare songs, recorded at home, that document the profundity of everyday interactions and chronicle moments of sublime realization. Diane Cluck’s voice quivers with conviction throughout as she sings about love, family, and the complexities of simply being alive. There is immense care put into her words and diction, the poetry galloping from her mouth in twisting metaphorical phrases. Her arrangements are spare, giving the words space to percolate as you hear them echo around her apartment. Cluck is a masterful songwriter—a rarity in the Important catalog in recent years, but a defining feature of its first decade of existence.