To be released on CD, cassette, and digitally on August, 25th, 2023. CD packaged in a mini LP jacket. C50 – green cassette with black imprints. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To purchase, head to our Bandcamp page.

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Gainesville, FL-based composer/multi-instrumentalist Tristan Whitehill releases music under the moniker Euglossine. Whitehill envisions each Euglossine release as an outlet for a particular subset of discrete genre explorations, applying his prodigious musical training and vast depth of theory knowledge to styles as far-flung as breezy jazz fusion, technoid beat excursions, bleep-heavy modular synth sketches, and hushed acoustic guitar reveries. Bug Planet Is the Current Timeline, the second Euglossine album on Hausu Mountain, follows the sublime Coriolis [HAUSMO83, 2019] and joins a rich catalog of diverse releases on labels including Orange Milk, Beer on the Rug, and Genot Centre. Bug Planet balances hyper-high-fidelity synth arrangements and busy drum patterns with Whitehill’s ever-bewitching performances on guitar, bass, piano, and flutes. The album offers us a hybrid strain of Euglossine music that moves away from his more compartmentalized genre experiments to spread its progressive contours out before us over in every direction he can imagine, landing somewhere in territories that Whitehill describes as: “Biodub, Digital Fusion, or Mutant Jazz.” If our current timeline is bug planet, Euglossine stands at the entrance in the underbrush, waiting to take our six-to-eight feelers and lead us into a miniature subterranean civilization of his own design. Speaking on the themes that inform the album, Whitehill explains, “Insects are the most bio-diverse kingdom on Earth. Over half of the organism species on earth are insects. I wanted to share this feeling that just maybe we are not in control of this planet and a hidden ancient force will long outlast our weird struggle.”

Bug Planet finds Euglossine building on his manifold talents over multiple overlapping trajectories. While the album’s percussion programming skirts the closest in the project’s catalog to what could be called “IDM,” Whitehill never sacrifices the organic qualities of his work for the sake of rote complexity. His beats constantly evolve and reject repetition, jittering along their own fluctuating paths as individual drum elements warp in their positions around the mix and surge in intensity into compact flashes of drum n’ bass, acid techno, downtempo, and dub. In the album’s more abstract moments, Whitehill shifts the magnifying glass away from his labyrinthine rhythms to conjure up passages of jazzy harmony that reach us in both electronic and hands-on-instrument flourishes. Sunny synth phrases pour out in arpeggiated helixes and melt into tranquil piano performances or blankets of billowing pads. Sinuous basslines performed on both guitars and keyboards bump as rhythmic foundations for ornate percussion workouts. Whitehill’s guitar playing, which frequently takes center stage on Euglossine albums as the lead melodic voice, pops into view as a more strategically deployed counterpoint to Bug Planet Is the Current Timeline’s often alien spreads of tone, like the artist blasting out of the hive in guitarist mode for a brief but dazzling solo before flying off into the distance.

Without the use of external sampled music, Whitehill imbues Bug Planet Is the Current Timeline with the atmosphere of a fast-shifting audio collage. Most tracks speed over two or three minute timelines and rise along linear song structures that introduce momentary riffs, synth surges, and beats that only appear once before giving way to further developments — living up to the hallmark of truly “progressive” music. Euglossine lays out meticulous arrangements that juxtapose contrasting fidelities, from bulbous kick drum cycles to crystalline synth and guitar phrases to garbled glitch noise texture, without ever losing the sense of human warmth present at the core of his work. His music delights us with its flights of dexterity and its structural inventiveness just as often as it tugs on our heartstrings with a more traditional melody dripping with unabashed sentimentalism. Whitehill channels the depth of his knowledge in music theory and production not to bowl us over with his technicality, but rather to give life to his ideas in all their wide scope and to lay out musical narratives in unpredictable arcs that only he could devise.