–

To be released on Tape and CD on June 12th, 2026. Design by HausMo Max. Tape is a clear purple C60 with white imprints packaged with a 2-sided 4-panel J-card. CD packaged in 4-panel gatefold digipak. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To purchase, head to our Bandcamp page.

Max Allison co-founded Hausu Mountain with Doug Kaplan in 2012 and serves as the label’s resident visual artist and designer. Since 2013 he has made solo music under the moniker Mukqs, which finds him twisting elements of ambient music, noise, techno, video game music, and free-for-all sample collage into rapidly shifting productions united under the banner of his strictly live, hardware-focused practice. Mukqs releases have appeared on labels including Orange Milk, Patient Sounds, Husky Pants, Jacktone, No Rent, Midwich, Doom Trip, and Umor Rex. Allison performs as a member of projects including free music trio Good Willsmith, rock band BBsitters Club, noise duos Tasha’s Hideous Laughter and Manual Pollination, and a number of collaborations with musicians and friends based in his home of Chicago. In 2022 Allison started the Hausu Mountain satellite label Blorpus Editions, home to a growing catalog of dozens of releases by an international cadre of contemporary experimental artists.

Juckport, Mukqs’s first album in nearly two years, is animated by a duality of glitched-out abstraction and intangible bliss. Synthesizer pads stretch beyond the imagination’s horizon line, counterbalanced by a churn of clipped samples that scatter across the stereo field like rapidfire psychedelic flashbacks. Cohesion emerges through textural continuity and development rather than repetition or pattern-making. Blink and innumerable details might slip by unnoticed, and the landscape might have shifted entirely. Still, as more viscous sounds enfold the listener, they communicate a calm, settled mindset, reflecting the motion of a creative mental state; large amounts of information cohere into a focused stream that reacts intuitively with the introduction of each new complicating element.

Allison underpins this sense of flow and spontaneity with his unique style of production. Juckport was, like most of his catalog, performed live on his SP-404MKII sampler in a single continuous take and recorded without overdubs: all panning and spatialization, all arrangement and mixing, a product of in-the-moment decision making. Each track begins as a bank of samples sourced from Allison’s collection of synthesizers, drum machines, and field recordings, arrows pointing in a direction but arranged without premeditated counterpoint. Spontaneity, and the sometimes chaotic juxtapositions it engenders, undercut any traces of machine logic in the music as it expands and contracts organically. It is the product of hands moving in real space, in real time, for an extended period.

Surprising confluences and stylistic turns emerge and flourish. “The Inconvenience of Being Known” is led by acoustic piano, performed by Allison at Chicago’s Elastic Arts, presented nearly without edits or cuts and assembled into free-floating fusion that resembles The Necks or Eberhard Weber’s classic albums for ECM. The constantly evolving beatwork of “Octopascal” provides a rare moment of cohesion, albeit one with a relentless drive away from predictability. The clutter and clatter of the drum machine on “Breeding Ground for Edge Vertices” gives way to “Immortality (Types 1, 5, and 9)” – a misty-eyed expanse of wispy synth that borders on the honeyed. By the time the subterranean deep house pulse of “Abyss Baby” surfaces, a steady kick feels like the real glitch in the timeline.

One of the visual throughlines for the album art that Allison makes for releases on Hausu Mountain, including the apocalyptic tableau that serves as the cover for Juckport, is the inclusion of a sunset or expanse of sky deep in the background of a digitally-rendered landscape bursting with color, shape, and detail. The feeling of sublime connection to the world and its place in the universe that these vistas represent can be felt not only in the album’s most sonically expansive moments, but in its sense of play. Experiences of this kind of utopian serenity only come with a sense of openness and comfort in the unmoored, and often lose their impact when we see the postcard ahead of time. Once we settle into the twisting nature of the path, its crags and odd angles, the wide-eyed ecstasy of the view comes into focus.

 — Jonathan Williger, 2026