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To be released on CD and digitally on November 6th, 2026. CD packaged in mini-LP jacket with artwork from HausMo Max and Kendall Buckingham. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To purchase, head to our Bandcamp page.
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Chicago-based songwriter / producer / multi-instrumentalist Joey Meland makes music under the name Cocojoey. Their album STARS (HAUSMO144, 2025) stands as a contemporary landmark in the Hausu Mountain catalog, showcasing their ecstatic approach to “pop music” that overflows with finely wrought details and juxtaposed flashes of far-flung genres. Meland’s omnivorous compositions tie together aspects of prog, death metal, video game music, experimental electronics, and untold other styles into luminescent pieces that still hit as pop tunes. Animated by their creator’s penchant for earworm hooks and dazzling melodic architectures, Cocojoey’s songs teem with their virtuosic keyboard performances and vocal takes that flit from gorgeous operatic falsetto all the way to guttural growls that activate the mosh pit whenever they perform live. A calendar year after the album’s release, STARS gets a second orbit around the galaxy in the form of STARS REROLL. Though nominally a collection of remixes, the fellow Hausu Mountain artists that Meland asked to rework songs from STARS treat the source material as a jumping-off point to sculpt bespoke worlds of their own, infused with the sonic signatures and future-facing production styles that each artist explores in their own music. Hausu Mountain is nothing if not a family enterprise, as the label’s artists regularly make music together, play shows and tour together, and consider each other close friends. With STARS REROLL, the roster of buds gleefully deconstructs and rebuilds Cocojoey’s album, following their own ideas wherever they may lead while never losing the euphoric energy and stylistic variety that made the original shine so brightly.
Angel Marcloid takes on Cocojoey’s “TIME TO GO!” under the banner of her Fire-Toolz moniker – a flagship project in the HausMo catalog that now releases music with the venerable Warp Records. Her “vapAORwave edit” dials down the tempo on the original (a classic vaporwave strategy) so Meland’s voice lands in a lower register closer to a hard rock singer of yore, and Marcloid’s production brings the AOR flourishes to match: soaring guitar solos, majestic keyboard lines, tom-heavy drum fills. The composite sounds like something you’d hear on an 80s-focused oldies radio station and struggle to remember where exactly it came from. Montreal-based producer d’Eon reconstructs Cocojoey’s “TRUST IN EVENTS” from the ground up in his post-baroque digital production style, arranging the original’s melodic cascades for a deep arsenal of synthetic instrumentation. A percussive string section carries the chord progression as d’Eon reiterates the lead melody with intertwined horns, woodwinds, harpsichords, and dulcimers. The version filters the twists of Meland’s composition through d’Eon’s classical sense of grandeur, equally suited for a symphonic concert hall or the soundtrack of a turn-of-the-century Squaresoft RPG. Chicago-based producer Mike Meegan a.k.a. RXM Reality gets rowdy with his remix of “ODD EYE SLIDE” as he rearranges tiny fragments of the original into a jittery high-BPM grid that ripples with ballistic drum programming and speaker-shredding bursts of ultra-definition sound design. Chopping Meland’s voice into momentary samples and weaving them into a new web of hocketing shouts, RXM Reality emerges with something akin to Chicago juke music charged by incessant repetition and complex micro-rhythms, with each new element he introduces ratcheting up the intensity closer to the boiling point.
New Jersey-based experimental prog freak queen Faye Fadem a.k.a. Trust Fund Ozu (who has her Hausu Mountain debut in the pipeline for 2027) jokes that her remix philosophy amounts to “making a whole new Trust Fund Ozu song” – and her take on Cocojoey’s “hearth<3” proves to be no exception. Though her remix maintains some melodies and synth parts of the original, her ferocious new vocal performance and dizzying drums mutate an already overloaded song into an even more bonkers experience that leapfrogs from one torrential climax to the next. HausMo honchos Max Allison a.k.a. Mukqs and Doug Kaplan a.k.a. MrDougDoug each turn in reworks of their own. For his “Scramble” of “THE I LIKE SONG,” Mukqs strictly sticks to audio sourced from Cocojoey’s original, but grinds individual elements into dust and sprinkles them across the stereo spread with hard panning spatialization tactics. In the fast-scrolling collage style that defines one branch of Mukqs’s music, his version peppers Meland’s screams and programmed drums over thinly diced synth lines, piecing together a queasy cut-up noise session that never repeats any moment twice. Kaplan’s “Scrumble” of “TIME TO SPARE” stretches out to over eight minutes as he recontextualizes the MIDI data from the original song’s session file into a warp-speed network of short loops that elastically shift their starting and ending points – in keeping with the MIDI-scavenging / re-arranging production ideology that has defined his solo output on HausMo. MrDougDoug’s unique tonal sensibilities transfix us with his Conlon Nancarrow-esque piano rolls, chunky bass slaps, and squished vocal formants, while his remix’s sum total feels like zooming into single phrases of Meland’s composition and expanding them into an ever-rotating cross-section of each detail.
Remixes by Cocojoey bookend STARS REROLL, as the composer takes the opportunity to re-imagine “TINY SPRITE IN THE ORCHESTRA OF THE STARS” through two distinct lenses. The collection opens with “TINY SPRITE (COCOJOEY DANCE MIX),” in which Meland surrounds their original’s delicate synth melodies and wistful vocal takes with a constantly morphing palette of modern dancefloor production. Shards of breakcore segue straight into dubstep bass womps and give way to acid techno squiggles, transmuting a song that originally sounded like exploring a tranquil video game environment into a banger fit for peak time at a particularly outré rave. Meland zeroes in on the cozy VGM factor of “TINY SPRITE” with their collection-concluding version dubbed “ORCHESTRA OF THE STARS (Cocojoey’s Town Theme).” Rebuilding the melodies with a menu of dayglo PS1-era synths and pianos planted against a sprightly 808 drum track that pops with tom-tom bubbles and clave clicks, the rework’s welcoming atmosphere paints the image of a town square bustling with activity. It serves as a fitting end to a collection populated by a crew of friends with diverse production styles and approaches to the process of remixing – as if Hausu Mountain’s roster got together to check out the market and grab lunch together in a townscape brought to life by Cocojoey’s vibrant musical vision before each heading down their own alleyway and off into the distance.
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