To be released on CD, cassette, and digitally on September 22nd, 2023 at the same time as Mukqs – “Stonewasher” in the HausMo Honcho Batch. CD packaged in a mini LP jacket. C40 – clear cassette with full color labels and artwork by MrDougDoug. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To purchase, head to our Bandcamp page.

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Doug Kaplan makes music under the name MrDougDoug and Maxwell Allison makes music under the name Mukqs. The two artists co-founded the label Hausu Mountain in 2012 and have collaborated in projects that stretch back to the math rock band The Earth is a Man (formed in 2008). Over the following years they performed in a roster of bands that includes the experimental trio Good Willsmith (with Natalie Chami a.k.a. TALsounds), the plunderphonic noise duo Pepper Mill Rondo, the prog / jamband quartet BBsitters Club, and the psych-rock quintet The Big Ship. Mukqs albums have appeared on labels including Orange Milk, Husky Pants, No Rent, Doom Trip, and Umor Rex, in addition to a wide array of self-released music on Allison’s netlabel Blorpus Editions. Blorpus has also featured MrDougDoug’s music, which joins a catalog of Kaplan’s self-released experiments in longform sample collage. As solo artists, Kaplan and Allison haven’t been featured in the Hausu Mountain catalog since the 2016 releases of MrDougDoug’s SOS Forks AI REM (HAUSMO50) and Mukqs’s Walkthrough (HAUSMO49). Now the HausMo honchos return to home base to offer up a fresh double dose: MrDougDoug with SOS Forks AI REM II and Mukqs with Stonewasher.

On Stonewasher, Maxwell Allison achieves what he considers a level-up for the Mukqs project. While he approaches each Mukqs release with a specific genre and set of themes in mind, making albums that could be filed under harsh noise, video game music, aquatic electro / techno, intricate IDM programming, and hip-hop (in his duo producing for Chicago rapper Sharkula), Stonewasher turns the dial resolutely towards the realms of all-consuming glitch collage. The album’s improvised performance recorded live with no overdubs infuses the chaotic energy of a noise set into the dynamic narrative flow and tonal diversity of progressive electronic music. Mukqs never gives his spread of sounds a chance to settle, as sentimental melodies get swallowed by blasts of noise and shards of vocals cut into arrhythmic drum patterns. Allison performed the album live on a standalone sampler into which he recorded a library of original patterns from his arsenal of hardware synths and drum machines. Inspired by the vocal sample deconstruction of artists from Carl Stone to Burial, Allison sought to inject a grounding element into Stonewasher by fusing the dizzying palette of electronics with chopped samples of human voices culled from royalty-free a cappella videos on Youtube. Hi-definition beat programs stutter and trip over themselves as synthetic tones ranging from guitars to mallet percussion to orchestral instruments swirl into warped semblances of harmony along with the vocal missives. If its final incarnation sounds overwhelming in its layered volleys of texture and rhythm, every sound that listeners hear resulted from the press of a button on Allison’s hardware sampler during a single live performance. This stubborn adherence to spontaneous creation using a limited palette of equipment has defined the Mukqs project from its inception, in all of its improvised mess and its moments of half-accidental complexity. If music is the opposite of seamless — all seams — then it begins to approach its own twisted form of seamlessness.

SOS Forks AI REM II bears the fruit of Doug Kaplan’s longstanding quest to push his MrDougDoug project to a level of bewildering “all-over-the-place-core” MIDI programming and plunderphonic trickery. He stands at the gate in a top hat and tie-dye tails inviting us into a rare zone where vocaloid Animal Crossing sludge metal and minimalism a la Philip Glass sit side by side with synthetic air horns and simulated burps. Kaplan builds his tracks on the frameworks of MIDI files salvaged from the Internet Archive’s Geocities MIDI Collection, weaving together his structures from the unearthed scraps of all manner of songs from the traditions of rock, jazz, nü metal, country, and more. Having worked on the album since finishing the previous installation, Kaplan expanded his mode of creation with newly learned techniques in AI-generated MIDI, machine listening, software-based randomization, and extreme tempo automation. While essentially “sampling” the bones of karaoke MIDI files made in tribute to other artists, MrDougDoug renders any vestiges of melody or harmony nearly unrecognizable through the choices he makes for the digital instruments that perform his demented opuses. Kaplan harnesses soundfonts from video games released on Super Nintendo and N64, disfiguring the familiar tones and sound effects of those consoles through pitch-shifting and effect manipulation into carnivalesque curlicues or passages of majestic consonance. The soundfont tones collide with his battery of percussive and abrasive software instruments into programmed MIDI rolls like the corrupted player piano of a modernized Conlon Nancarrow, blasting off into warp-speed high-BPM workouts, sinking into trudges through the digital wasteland, or bending tempos mid-track to achieve a brain-melting degree of compositional elasticity. Kaplan’s meticulous process of recombining MIDI files and programming voices works in consort with his Merry Prankster nature to produce music that is at once baroque and, as he himself would tell you, often utterly annoying in its delivery – a maniacal orchestra offering up moment after moment of “???” and “lol wtf”. Despite the in-the-box software-based nature of his album’s creation, he pursued processes that would inject pure chance and unpredictable deviations into what could have manifested as antiseptic digital music. MrDougDoug’s vision of the present-as-future leads us away from the iridescent glass towers looming over the would-be utopian landscape and squirrels us down the tunnel to his deranged clown dimension. The wonders he presents to us down there can’t help but bear the humor and irreverence that he brings to his art practice – a mindset, coupled with that of Mukqs, that has come to define the output of Hausu Mountain as a whole.