To be released on cassette and digitally on 5/25/18. Blue tape with black imprints. 2-sided 3-panel J-Card with artwork from HausMo Max. Chrome Plus stock.

Quicksails is Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist producer Ben Billington. The Bright follows 2016’s Mortal LP on Hausu Mountain and a catalog of vinyl and tape releases on labels like Spectrum Spools and NNA. In a host of other projects including the shapeshifting improv group ADT, the long-running experimental industrial collective ONO, and the firebrand free-jazz trio Tiger Hatchery, Billington’s freewheeling drum performances swerve between loose-limbed, cascading flourishes and steady rock-informed grooves. Alone behind his rig of synths and samplers, Quicksails transmutes his mentality behind the drum kit to the realm of electronic production. His compositions unfold with pulsing electronic leads and swathes of polyphonic drone that wash his mixes in a new age sheen to contrast the stark industrial percussion patterns beneath. He stacks interacting rhythmic elements into multi-tiered mosaics that bear the unpredictable structural detours of electro-acoustic improv and a focus on texture and atmosphere in line with the school of 70s kosmische and the 21st century ambient underground. Quicksails’s tracks juxtapose lush piano and harp-like synth voices with amorphous loops of staccato rhythm. Billington tempers his fascination with sampled acoustic sound sources with explorations of the molding and disfiguring of electronics into alien formants somewhere between drum voices and dollops of tonality.

The tape’s B-side invites a crew of friends and Hausu Mountain artists to reinterpret The Bright. Ohio-based producer Khaki Blazer (Pat Modugno of Moth Cock) mangles fragments of the tape’s title track into a stew of garbled carnival-core samples and percolating, footwork-inspired beats. Chicago-based composer/synthesist Brett Naucke stretches and processes the layered electronic missives of “My Moon” into a web of panning melodic patches and bursts of mechanical grit. Austin’s Shit and Shine churn up “Purge” into a quivering pile of rhythmic magma and bump through the noise with bruised drum patterns. Angel Marcloid’s (HausMo artist Fire-Toolz) omnivorous vapor/synth project Mindspring Memories melts “Flinch” into a half-remembered 80s slow jam carried through a series of dramatic crescendos.