ROM – Possible Mountain

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Purchase the cassette, 7″, or bundle in our e-shoppe!

Digital release on 4/15, Physical release on 4/29. To be released on both cassette tape, and a 7″ with tracks “Pulpo” and “Crawl Upside Down” with album download coupon. Also available in a bundle. Artwork by DopeBoy & HausMo co-founder Max Allison.

Roberto Carlos Lange and Matt Crum make music as ROM. Their collaborative sketches unfold in blossoming layers of synth, live drum takes, and stacked acoustic instrumentation – all stitched together over a lattice of burbling samples and electronics. Hausu Mountain proudly debuts Possible Mountain, a full-length collection of recordings tracked over a marathon week of studio sessions at Shangri-La Studios in 2005. Over the years that followed, Lange has built a diverse catalog on Asthmatic Kitty Records as Helado Negro, a project renowned for its combinatory approach to vocal pop music and Lange’s magnetism as a performer. As ROM, Lange and Crum assume the role of multi-instrumental studio magpies, fixating us with the consonant pull of their melodies and their textured lead voices that bristle against each other in warm shades of static and rounded sine waves.

ROM fuse the diasporic experimentalism of the tropicália tradition with the immaculate production detail of Brian Eno or Jim O’Rourke. When they skirt closer to overt prog or fusion (see the Fripp-esque whale call guitar of “Pulpo” or the polyrhythmic interplay between live and electronic percussion on “And We Will Go”), they exploit complex arrangements more for their emotional potential than their sense of bombast. When they strip down their palette to little more than a beat and a burbling synth patch, we float with them in a pleasant lull just long enough to prepare for the next leg of the journey. Sudden onsets of iridescent melody take hold of “Starve Your Time,” swelling the track into a whirlwind of glockenspiel, acoustic guitar, and piano that whisks us straight into a new landscape. “Crawl Upside Down” starts off as a major-key folk stomp before shifting its rhythmic grid on a dime and collapsing into a mutated network of pulses and vocalizations. ROM exploit overdubbing practices to collage discrete takes into a patchwork of moments in time, dictating the structures of their tracks as much from the all-seeing perspective of post-production as the moment of live performance. Despite its emergence in 2016 as a kind of time capsule, Possible Mountain teems with ideas that feel vital in the context of today’s tape underground: the slow-burning focus on timbre and texture; the impulse to hypnotize with tightly balanced repetitions and variations; the no-holds-barred approach to genre and juxtaposed atmospheres.

 

 

 

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7 inch artwork

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