To be released on CD, cassette, and digitally on October 27th, 2023. CD packaged in a mini LP jacket. C50 – clear blue cassette with white imprints and artwork by HausMo Max. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To purchase, head to our Bandcamp page.

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Cleveland-based producer Tim Thornton makes music under the moniker Tiger Village. Thornton has carved out a niche in the American experimental underground through the wide-spanning releases of his own label Suite 309, as well as through his day job as a quality control supervisor at the Gotta Groove Records manufacturing plant — meaning that his ears serve as the finish line for a vast slate of vinyl projects that hit the market every year. The Celebration, the fourth Tiger Village release on Hausu Mountain since 2014, joins a catalog that includes releases on Orange Milk, Patient Sounds, and HausMo sublabel Blorpus Editions, along with a battery of music self-released through Suite 309. Within the jittering IDM-adjacent networks of The Celebration, Thornton expands his craft on multiple concurrent trajectories, digging deeper into complex drum programming and labyrinthine synth arrangement while further exploring passages of vocal synthesis and non-recursive song structures that thrive on unpredictability and constant fluctuation.

Thornton can’t help but bring a wide-eyed curiosity to anything he produces, as he rejects the dead-serious gun-metal intensity of many strains of contemporary electronic production in favor of bright tones and wonky rhythms. Like fellow Hausu Mountain artists Wobbly and Moth Cock, Tiger Village revels in cheeky compositional about-faces and carnivalesque synth lines. In all their staccato voices and peals of abstract texture, Thornton’s tracks blur the lines between harmonic electronic elements and drum patterns. The album morphs before our ears every few seconds or so, allowing arrhythmic loops and alternating rhythmic grids to contrast against whatever might seem to be the bedrock of any given piece. Despite the density of the music, Tiger Village populates his mixes with a relatively small number of elements, each of which evolves along its own path with rhythmic disruptions and timbral shifts. Any given synth part might announce itself in the mix as an intermittent bleep, brittle in its first appearance, before blooming through tonal manipulation into a saturated sweep of day-glo grandeur. By paying attention to the trajectory of every dollop of sound, Tiger Village pulls off magic tricks in his pointillist arrangements in which nothing remains static — everything pushes towards a state of progressive complication.

Thornton describes The Celebration as music “made amidst, about, and because of everyday joys. Stuff like my family, cats, Star Trek & music” and goes on to call it a program of “creepy crawly sounding tracks with joyous intent, made with my family around in close quarters. They make their way in through things like samples of my cats eating or my kid singing.” Thornton’s grade-school aged daughter Laura, whose music in collaboration with her dad has previously appeared on a Suite 309 release under the moniker Zebra Zebra, appears on two tracks of The Celebration in shards of manipulated vocals that infuse the proceedings with her whimsy. In addition to Laura’s contributions, Thornton acknowledges that various types of vocal synthesis appear throughout the album, and he points out that this is the closest Tiger Village release to something resembling a “vocal album.” Thanks to Thornton’s drive to gleefully warp every tone that slides into his productions, the distinction between what originated as a vocal take and what tones stemmed from his storehouse of synthesizers becomes anybody’s guess other than his own. Regardless of tonal provenance, the joyful spirit of Tiger Village’s music and the personality of Thornton himself come through loud and clear throughout The Celebration: he strives to make music complex and surprising enough to confound even the deepest heads among his listeners without compromising the sense of expansive playfulness at the heart of his project.