To be released on cassette and digitally on 7/19/19. C38 – 

Black shell with white imprints – super-ferric stock. 2-sided 3-panel J-card with artwork by HausMo Max. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To view the store page, click here.

RXM Reality is Chicago-based producer Mike Meegan. His futuristic strain of detailed beat work jitters somewhere between the margins of kinetic IDM, grimy industrial electronics, and intricately spatialized textural collage. DEViL WORLD WiDE, his second release with Hausu Mountain, builds on the precedent established by Panic Cycle (HAUSMO72, 2018), as Meegan steers his hybrid rig of hardware samplers and software systems through a series of rhythmic sketches that are as transfixing as they are claustrophobic. While RXM Reality builds his tracks over a rough grid that keeps one foot rooted in danceable rhythms, bursts of jagged percussion counteract the groove while noise debris drips between morphing synthetic elements. Individual synth voices serve as both anti-melodic lead lines and rhythmic markers akin to drum patterns, quivering their way through his tracks in various states of granular disintegration. When he eases back on the level of density and allows his sound sources to melt into swathes of silence, specters of beat structures carry on in lurching, start-and-stop rhythms.

RXM Reality’s music draws inspiration from his urban surroundings in Chicago as much as from a growing canon of dystopian audio and visual touchstones that inch closer and closer to real life as time goes on. DEViL WORLD WiDE’s fractal, continually splintered approach to sound design recalls the work of modern luminaries like Arca and Actress, two influences Meegan cited as formative to his expanding conceptions of production and composition. Like fellow members of the Hausu Mountain roster such as Fire-Toolz, Khaki Blazer, or Bonnie Baxter, the music of RXM Reality toys with building blocks of dark humor and chaotic irreverence, as tracks break into unexpected shifts in mood or shed any semblance of legible rhythm on a dime to explode into the territory of pure texture. A pummeling passage of breakbeats might slide into a patch of 8-bit squelch, while a brief flash of bouncy, major-key melody might herald the waves of feedback rushing in to wash out the mix. With track titles that land between the diction of dependence (“The Enabler,” “Addict”) and inner serenity (“Totally Stress Free,” “Prayers to Fall Asleep in Perfect Peace”), DEViL WORLD WiDE offers hints at the motivations that orbit Meegan’s art. In practice, RXM Reality’s tracks transcend our mundane daily existence and transmute his internal turmoil and composure into pulsing networks of sound as complex as the emotions that inspired them.