To be released on Tape, Double CD and digitally on July 19th, 2024. C90 – white cassette with black imprints, an XL 5-panel J-Card and artwork by Moth Cock Pat & HausMo Max. Double CD packaged in a 4-panel gatefold jacket with CD pockets. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To purchase, head to our Bandcamp page.
Hausu Mountain continues the HausLive series of live show recordings that capture some of the headiest moments in Chicago underground music, following volumes from Sunwatchers and Good Willsmith with a pair of Chi-town gigs from Kent, Ohio’s legendary carnival-core-free-jazz-noise duo Moth Cock — compiled together into HausLive 3: Chicago Twofer. The series channels the spirit of the informal bootlegging and tape trading of audience recordings as pioneered by the community surrounding the Grateful Dead, honing in on the raw live energy and in-the-moment emotions that make each show stand out in the stream of time. Selected as part of the label’s ongoing collaboration with the prolific Chicago taper and HausMo mega-friend Joel Berk, HausLive 3: Chicago Twofer documents two of Moth Cock’s sets at beloved DIY spaces in Chicago in 2023: one in May at Not Not, and another in December at Digital Art Demo Space (DADS) as part of the label’s HausMo Holiday Bash. Presented as a single release with two 40+ minute sets, HausLive 3: Chicago Twofer continues Moth Cock’s streak of continual evolution as an unpredictable live act whose loosely structured improvisations spiral off into confounding zones capable of inducing the deepest altered states of mind and body. The album represents a notable shift in Moth Cock’s recorded output from performances recorded for various remote livestreams during the pandemic back into the realm of live shows, a shift that corresponds with the ongoing reawakening and fresh openings of DIY spaces old and new that Chicago has seen over the last couple years of burgeoning underground activity.
With HausLive 3: Chicago Twofer joining the Hausu Mountain catalog as the seventh (!) Moth Cock release, the band becomes the most released project in the label’s history — beginning all the way back in 2012 with Bremmy and reaching one notable peak ten years later with 2022’s mammoth three-tape / three-point-five-hour odyssey Whipped Stream and Other Earthly Delights (not to mention three solo releases over the years by Moth Cock member Pat Modugno’s project Khaki Blazer). Brought to life by the duo’s stripped down rig of drum machine, guitar pedals, microphones, saxophone, and trumpet, the music captured on HausLive 3 completely defies the humble physical reality of its origin and blasts into the outer reaches of brain-scrambling electro-acoustic noise improv. Always delivered with a wink, or even the full-on grimace of a mutated clown, the duo’s music rejects notions of noise performance as an outlet for aggression or aural violence in favor of a sense of cartoonish whimsy and gonzo tomfoolery.
As he sits in his trademark comfy lawn chair or whatever the venue has available (notably a La-Z-Boy recliner at DADS), Doug Gent’s performances on the saxophone squeal and croak their way through unidentifiable tonalities, landing somewhere between a free-jazz veteran who has passed far beyond the need for conventional notes or scales and the sax player in Carl Stalling’s Looney Tunes orchestra tasked with only the most ridiculous chase scenes. Pat Modugno funnels Gent’s sax through his loop and effects pedals, stretching and mangling it even further beyond recognition into standing clouds of intersecting woodwind skronk that swell over the course of these sessions’ multiple upward peaks. Meanwhile, Modugno also serves as the band’s “rhythm section,” pumping out a stream of fractured beats and unholy synth bleeps that congeal into lurching grooves that send heads bobbing if they’re in the right state of mind. Over his spontaneous beat backdrops and the layered swirls of Gent’s saxophone, Modugno also hits the mix on his microphone, often grunting or muttering a few words before stretching and looping those syllables into another bizarro texture within the stew. When Modugno picks up his trumpet, Moth Cock can enter a truly brain-melting state of double horn chaos, as shrill trumpet fanfares crash into networks of sinuous sax lines like a brass band slowly sinking into a vat of molasses.
With the individual components of their sound locked in for over fifteen years of the band’s existence, you might think you know what to expect when you put on a Moth Cock album. But as anyone who has seen them play live or was present at the shows documented on HausLive 3 knows, the band lives to defy expectations. The two sets demonstrate the extent to which the duo’s awareness of narrative drama and the arc of any given improvisation has developed over their years of shredding together. Each show has more contrasting and shorter individually developed movements than ever before, as they let the loops build and the rhythms complicate at a fast clip before jettisoning everything time and time in favor of a whole new vibe. As a result, we get more time to explore the idiosyncrasies of Modugno’s role as a “producer” within the band, as he airs out enough demented rhythmic ideas and corrupted synth patches to fuel montage after montage of even the most noise-hungry fiend’s fever dreams. The quicker turnover between the movements of HausLive 3 also attests to the diversity of sounds and moods that Moth Cock can conjure from their instruments. The duo slides from carnival background music into unexpected moments of near-consonant tranquility and out into some of their most minimal passages ever captured on tape, before falling through a trap door into what sounds like a robot factory spewing out new machines that fall apart before our eyes on the conveyor belt.
It’s worth remembering that these are 40+ minute live performances that never lose their twitchy energy and never settle into anything resembling a pattern. Gent and Modugno are marathon noisers possessing the mental and physical stamina to lead us on long journeys with them, and their obvious glee in taking strange left turns and surprising their audience comes across even on the audio alone. Joel Berk’s audience recordings capture the tone and spirit of the room, as attendees gasp and cheer along with each twist that the duo throws at them. It would be tempting to say that the tapes capture the band’s performances with warts and all, but when you’re dealing with Moth Cock, it’s all warts from the top to bottom. Plus, we all know that there are no mistakes in jazz, baby. With HausLive 3: Chicago Twofer, Moth Cock once again testify to why they remain a central pillar of the Hausu Mountain roster by best exemplifying the label’s ongoing mission to challenge and entertain listeners in equal measure. It’s certainly challenging music, populated with wailing klaxons and atonal horns, start-and-stop rhythms and inhuman grunts, and yet you can’t help but grin as it hits your brain stem: these dudes know how to have a good time, man. I wish I was there. (I was.)