Cocojoey – STARS – new artist in the HausMo family!

We’re so thrilled to announce a new addition to the Hausu Mountain roster – please welcome Cocojoey with open arms and a tunnel of high fives.

ANNOUNCING: Cocojoey – STARS – coming out on June 20th on CD, cassette, and digitally… as well as various merch options with download codes.

Chicago-based composer/producer Joey Meland makes music under the moniker Cocojoey. Treating genre conventions and ostensible barriers between disparate musical vocabularies like playthings to gleefully smash and reshape at will, Meland channels decades of experience as a polymathic professional musician adept in styles like metal, jazz, synthpop, and experimental sound design into their infinitely combinatory compositions. STARS, their first album on Hausu Mountain, follows the self-released COCOJOEY’S WORLD (2022) with a spellbinding burst of heart-on-sleeve self-expression. The album finds Cocojoey indulging their most adventurous impulses in production and technical instrumental performance, launching into a constantly morphing program that contrasts day-glo earworm hooks against cathartic moments of screaming intensity. Describing their work as an outlet to navigate difficult emotions and negative experiences through overwhelming bursts of absurdity, Meland’s music exudes warmth and finger-wagging mischief as it exhumes the depths of their psyche with the pure-hearted goal of making their audience smile — when those listening find a chance to breathe within the ecstatic overstimulation.

You can read even more about the album HERE and head over to the Bandcamp page in the embed above or HERE

Erica Eso – Songs In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand – out May 27

ANNOUNCING:
Erica Eso
Songs In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand

coming out on May 27 on CD, tape, and digitally! First track “Look Around You” streaming on our Bandcamp and all the other zones.

Kingston, NY-based composer / vocalist / producer Weston Minissali makes music under the moniker Erica Eso. Minissali’s work as Erica Eso injects strategies associated with the electronic avant-garde, including microtonal note voicings and advanced synthesis, into ornate compositions shaped in the idiom of art pop and focused on the keyboard as a primary instrument. Since forming in 2015, Erica Eso has shifted through diverse personnel configurations for live performances and their studio recordings released with NNA Tapes and Ramp Local, before settling into a quintet for their Hausu Mountain debut 192 (HAUSMO124, 2022).

For his new album Songs In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand, Minissali approached composition as a solo process, honing in on the granular details of his own songwriting and electronic production. Bolstered by the experience gained over the years he spent experimenting in his elaborate self-constructed home studio, Minissali sought to tie his artistic practice holistically into his daily life, cutting away inessentials and focusing inward both in sound and in lived experience. Songs In My Pocket offers us Minissali’s most adventurous songwriting and his most ornate production to date, pushing the Erica Eso project into new realms of complexity characterized by complete freedom in electronic arrangement. What once could have been called “DIY bedroom pop” now showcases Minissali’s time-earned studio expertise, brought to life by what he describes as “a much better (but still limited) understanding of just how expansive a studio-based process can be.”

Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet – HausLive 4 – out April 29

ANNOUNCING: Bill Orcutt Guitar QuartetHausLive 4 – out April 29 on cassette and digitally.

Hausu Mountain continues the HausLive series of live show recordings that capture some of the headiest moments in Chicago underground music. On HausLive 4, we rewind the clock approximately one year to May 3rd, 2024 at Constellation, where the all-star Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet (featuring Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza, and Shane Parish) made their barn-burning Chicago debut. 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 can make any 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 4 catches the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet in a sublime state of tour-hardened synergy with one another as they tear through the four-string guitar compositions that Orcutt wrote for his album Music for Four Guitars (Palilalia Records, 2022) with dialed-in fingers-on-fretboard precision, while also letting those songs evolve into flights of improvisation and extend into solo and duo passages led by each of the four guitarists. As Orcutt says on tape during one of the show’s interludes, “that record is thirty minutes; this show is an hour, so we’re improvising.” The resulting free-wheeling moments combine with the rigidity of Orcutt’s meticulous four-guitar compositions to form a program of music that draws power in equal measure from the forces of chance and discipline.

Dustin Wong – Gloria – out April 1st

Greetings HausMoNauts and sending big hugs and a never-ending succesion of high fives, fist bumps, and happy hellos. We’re so happy to announce the very first HausMo of 2025!!!

Coming out on April 1, 2025:
Dustin Wong – Gloria

We’re so thrilled to welcome Dustin’s new album Gloria, his third album with the label since 2018. With Gloria, Dustin channels specific memories and pieces of his family history into a deeply personal narrative arc focused on his grandmother Gloria Violet Lee Wong, who passed away in January 2024, just shy of her 96th birthday. Using a road trip they took together down the west coast of America in 2023 as the direct inspiration for the individual scenes and flashes of imagery that form the album’s continuously unfolding structure, Wong presents Gloria as a memorial to her storied life and a celebration of the warmth and kindness that characterized their close relationship. A moment-to-moment travelogue that zooms out in its full scope to evoke a multi-generational memoir that spans decades and continents, Gloria gives Wong space to open his heart and uncover his roots — all while experimenting with new techniques in live performance and sound design that lead his music into territories that he has never before explored.

You can check the album out on Bandcamp, and read more about it on the catalog page.

Body Meπa – Prayer in Dub – out now!

We’re beyond excited to share our first vinyl release in a long while with the whole HausMo universe. Body Meπa is back in action with their 2nd HausMo album! Prayer in Dub is available on LP (clear vinyl and black vinyl), CD, and digitally via Bandcamp and all the usual culprits.

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. While Body Meπa recorded much of Prayer in Dub within the same period that followed their formation and first LP’s creation in 2020-2021, 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. Focused on textural and rhythmic detail, repetition and variation of central motifs, and slowly evolving sessions that find room for improvisation, the quartet hesitate to pin down their amorphous output any further than the broad scope of what they describe as “New York City body music.” Their work engages with the physicality of “rock band” performance while stretching that idiom to its breaking point, all while evoking the environment that brought it to life: the city of New York in all its multitudes, where all four band members grew up.

RXM Reality – No. 1 in the World – out now!

HausMoNauts! Excited to tell you that one of the most HausMo artists on the planet has cooked up an exciting new pasta for you to eat. That’s right, RXM Reality is back with his 5th (!!!) HausMo album – No. 1 in the WorldNot only is this album the longest RXM album in existence, but it’s also his most ambitious, far-flung, exploratory work to date. Continuing his experimentation with vocals, RXM Reality pushes the project in a thousand different directions, all the while maintaining his signature production style. Out now on tape, CD, t-shirt w/ DL code, and digitally via all the usual culprits.

Live Music Summer continues with new music from BBsitters Club

HausHello to everyone tuning in and splashing a big cosmic wave from the rainbow dorsal your way! We’ve got new music from BBsitters Club – a rock and roll band featuring HausMo Doug and HausMo Max along with our friends Carl and Paul. Joel’s Picks Vol. 2 compiles some of our best live takes from the last five years into one special album. A JAMBAND THAT PLAYS MATH ROCK? COUNTRY-FRIED RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS? MIDI GUITAR SKRONK? CAPTAIN BEEFHEART COVER? Ok shut up Doug and check it out please:

The HausLive series continues with new Moth Cock!

HausMoNauts Hear Ye! HausMo continues the HausLive series of live show recordings that capture some of the headiest moments in Chicago underground music, following volumes from Sunwatchers and Good Willsmith 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 Digital Art Demo Space (DADS) as part of the label’s HausMo Holiday Bash. 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. The album represents a notable shift in Moth Cock’s recorded output from performances recorded for various remote livestreams during the pandemic back into the realm of live shows, a shift that corresponds with the ongoing reawakening and fresh openings of DIY spaces old and new that Chicago has seen over the last couple years of burgeoning underground activity.

d’Eon returns with Leviathan

HausMo Hear Ye! We’re pleased as pudding to present the second HausMo album from Montreal-based composer/producer d’Eon. With his ongoing focus on ornately composed digital chamber music that highlights synthetic orchestral tones and cascades of complex melodicism, Leviathan offers us an evolution of the forms explored on Rhododendron and Music for Keyboards Vol. 3 and 4 while leading us onward into untrodden pastures for the d’Eon project. Leviathan comes out on June 21st on tape, CD, t-shirt w/ DL code, and digitally via Bandcamp and all the other zones!

first HausMo of 2024: FIN – Cleats

Greetings HausMoNauts! So excited to share some spectacular news with you on this fine day. FIN returns to the HausMo catalog, a minute after 2017’s Ice Pix, with a new album of gorgeous idiosyncratic self-produced pop music. bizarro baroque jams, hymns for a ceremony in a holographic cathedral. Cleats comes out on May 31st on cassette, CD, and digitally.

music video by Mimi Bowman https://www.instagram.com/dallemimi