Moth Cock – Whipped Stream and Other Earthly Delights

To be released on triple cassette boxset and digitally on 8/26/22. Artwork by Pat Modugno. Triple cassette boxset packaged in a printed slipcase with cassette notches. Contains three individual 70-minute tapes packaged in an outer sleeve. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To purchase, head to our Bandcamp page.

 

Moth Cock is the Kent, Ohio-based duo of Doug Gent and Pat Modugno. The band’s music — a corrupted amalgam of noise, free-jazz, improvised electronic beat music, drone, and gonzo carnivalesque wonkery — has served as a cornerstone of the Hausu Mountain catalog since the label’s inception ten years ago in 2012. Whipped Stream and Other Earthly Delights, the duo’s sixth release with HausMo, builds on a legacy that began with Bremmy (HAUSMO6, 2012) and evolved over the years through idiosyncratic experiments including their half of 2016’s split LP with Form A Log (HAUSMO31) all the way to If Beggars Were Horses, Wishes Would Ride (HAUSMO97, 2019). Modugno’s solo project Khaki Blazer has also held a major presence in the Hausu Mountain catalog over the course of three releases from 2015 onward that found him dipping deeper into deconstructed beats and smeared sample sketches that carry the spirit of Moth Cock’s relentless experimentation.

A mammoth collection of new Moth Cock music that stretches past the three hour mark, Whipped Stream represents the most expansive body of the duo’s work that has been released in one go to date in the form of a three tape boxset — the label’s first stand-alone multi-tape release. The triple album culls sessions recorded in the context of the band’s performances on streaming shows broadcast through Twitch, which appeared on the Hausu Mountain channel as part of their monthly Fun One series, as well as in the evenings of music curated by close friend and collaborator Sam Goldberg under the umbrella of his label Pizza Night. A durational smorgasbord of new music capable of knocking even the most seasoned zoner onto their ass on the concrete, Whipped Stream and Other Earthly Delights covers the full gamut of what Gent and Modugno are capable of when playing together.

Anyone who has seen Moth Cock perform live music can’t help but wonder at the disconnect between the physical reality of what they see before their eyes in relation to the sounds that hit their skulls. Their stripped-down rig includes nothing more than Modugno’s loop pedals, effects pedals, and decades-old Electribe sampler / drum machine, coupled with Gent’s hands-on live performance on saxophone (and occasionally clarinet) — along with moments where Modugno interjects the bleat of his trumpet into his rig of electronics. As one lead voice within the din, Gent blasts out torrents of spiraling sax mania while alternately sinking into long sustained notes that build through Modugno’s loops into standing walls of transportive drone texture. Meanwhile, Modugno shapes each session by interjecting strands of mangled synthesis, chopped beats, and corroded samples. All of these elements, splayed against the active input of Gent’s saxophone performances, funnel into spreads of bizarro noise shot through with the duo’s signature tongue-in-cheek humor and irreverence, daring us to laugh along with them while we submit ourselves to the full extent of their overwhelming chaos. At the end of the day, Moth Cock make it hard for us to perceive them as some kind of stodgy exponents of the more serious strains of “experimental music” as the world might perceive it at face value. Their music pulses with joy and sheer goofiness, as they never let us forget their main goals: to have some fun with it all and benevolently blow some minds.

Even to the ears of someone who has followed the duo from their inception over a decade ago, the music featured on Whipped Stream and Other Earthly Delights presents new avenues to explore within the Moth Cock project. The three-and-a-half hour boxset contains sessions that range from 6-8 minutes on the shorter end to close to thirty minutes on the longer end. Some sessions find their structure within the clatter of Modugno’s rhythms that congeal over bludgeoning kicks and rapid-fire snare runs into some distorted vision of beat music that lands a few meters away from the borders of leftfield club music, footwork, and industrial music. Other moments find them leaning into absolute narcosis, letting individual peals of sax and synth stretch and compound into time-dilating loops that encourage listeners to drop completely out of the “real world.” As a lead voice, Gent’s saxophone occasionally pops through the haze intact with little effects processing, veering between clarion calls of consonant post-jazz melodicism to unabashed guttural skronk hell. As the live “producer” of each session, feeding in his networks of samples and beats, Modugno shifts between pure smudged delirium to splatters of rhythm that could soundtrack an army of clowns emerging from one tiny car. Always hungry to expand the limits of their duo performance, always surprising listeners with new demented diversions, Moth Cock embody the core ethos of the entire Hausu Mountain universe: to challenge and to entertain, with virtually zero boundary between these modes of experiencing music.