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As the old adage goes: nothing is certain in this life except for death, taxes, and the release of another HausMo Mixtape. Doug Kaplan and Maxwell Allison, heads of the Chicago-based experimental label Hausu Mountain and members of projects like Good Willsmith, BBsitters Club, and Pepper Mill Rondo, scroll back through the label’s recent catalog for the third installment of their mixtape series. HausMo Mixtape III arrives with a special distinction, however: the commemoration of ten years of Hausu Mountain’s existence. Started by the honchos in 2012 to release their own music by projects like Good Willsmith and The Big Ship, the label has since expanded into a stand-alone universe that encompasses over 120 releases from dozens and dozens of artists, many of whom have become mainstays with three to six releases. While the roster grows with the occasional addition of new faces, many of the core artists continue to offer new music that moves the arcs of their catalogs to new territories while reinforcing the singular sounds that characterized their work from day one. Hausu Mountain’s tendency to keep things “in the family” in terms of the curation of the full body of releases allows listeners to trace the development of each artist’s sound and gives them repeated chances to check in with old friends and see what they’ve been getting into lately. The label’s visual aesthetic, spearheaded by the dense, surrealistic pixel art collage album art created by in-Haus designer Maxwell Allison and augmented by art provided by other artists themselves or their network of collaborators, imbues the catalog with a sense of unity oriented around a few central themes: distorting reality as we know it, finding some kind of transcendence in the transportive power of art, falling into new zones.

Hausmo Mixtape III culls material from 2020 up to 2022, a period of two years that saw massive upheavals in the world around us and major changes to the conditions of our daily lives, to say the least. Within this zone of uncertainty, the artists of Hausu Mountain still managed to create some of their most forward-thinking, mind-expanding works to date, and the label continued to issue around one release a month to convey their music out to the world. During the pandemic, the label and its associated artists leaned further into the connective capabilities of the internet, recognizing that the lack of live music performances didn’t have to be an end-all obstacle to continue to get new art out into the world. This period saw the introduction of the HausMo Fun One series of live at-home or in-studio performance streams broadcasted on Twitch, and also saw some artists dig deeper into long-form, durational releases that could not have been possible without plenty of time isolated in place (see: the eight-hour, four-album Ultra Cycle series of albums by Prolaps, and Fire-Toolz’s mammoth 2xLP Eternal Home).

HausMo Mixtape III’s 20 tracks lay out a body of far-flung styles and idiosyncratic visions that manage, like all of the label’s releases, to make some twisted sense when framed together. Featuring everything from progressive avant-electronics to ballistic technoid rave jams to gonzo pop deconstruction to ornate Neo-classical MIDI composition to tongue-in-cheek quasi-parodic rock music to stream of consciousness hip-hop to Christmas-themed plunderphonic sample deconstruction to academic-leaning sound art practices to pure ambient drift — to as many possible descriptors as there are numbers in the catalog. What HausMo releases share is the same as what drives Kaplan and Allison: a “chaotic good” motivation to entertain their listeners while challenging them in equal measure. Like a nice return to a familiar routine, listeners know that their next trip to Hausu Mountain will yield music consistent only in its unpredictability, committed to a benevolent strain of confusion.

In their approach to the curation of Hausu Mountain, Kaplan and Allison insist on abolishing distinctions between high- and low-brow art, and reject any generational or preconceived value judgements that slot genres and styles into hierarchies based on their “coolness” or “cheesiness” at any given moment of assessment. The continuum of music history has shown that nothing is constant, and the accelerating rate of cultural regurgitation and recursive trend-chasing has become more fickle and arbitrary than ever. To exist outside of that realm is to allow only your personal interests as a listener to guide you, and to acknowledge that unexpected delight or complexity can be found in any mode of creation. As culture collapses into itself, new forms are created from the synthesis of diametrically opposed ideas just as easily as they spring to life with no obvious precedent. Previously hated styles or tonal palettes provide a productive shock or a rush of joy when placed by the right hands in the right contexts. More than ever there really are no rules, other than those that artists impose upon themselves, and moments when even those limitations snap can yield truly exciting deviations. More than the musical traditions or production touchstones that Hausu Mountain artists choose to nod to on their path to self-expression, the vibrant personalities of the creators themselves shine brightly before us.