To be released on Tape, CD and digitally on October 4th, 2024. C62 – clear black tape with white imprints, and a 4-panel J-Card with artwork by HausMo Max & Emma Daffin. CD packaged in a 4-panel gatefold jacket. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To purchase, head to our Bandcamp page.

Chicago-based producer/composer Mike Meegan makes music under the moniker RXM Reality. Over the course of four albums on Hausu Mountain since 2018, along with 2021’s Advent LP on Orange Milk, Meegan refined a strain of electronic production that unites facets of breakcore, techno, grime, noise, and countless other styles into detailed composites that attest to his omnivorous tastes and bottomless technical acumen as a producer. While his live performances over the past few years and 2022’s Sick For You (HAUSMO126) found him experimenting with his own lead vocals for the first time, pushing the dial somewhere closer to mutated pop music injected with distorted roars in the digital hardcore tradition, his new album No. 1 in the World (his fifth on Hausu Mountain) dives into the song-oriented branch of his work more than ever before. The album’s hour-long program spans twenty-four shorter tracks that highlight Meegan as the frontman and singer/songwriter of his own morphing one-person ensemble, without sacrificing any of the complex and unpredictable production decisions that animate his music. Acknowledging the influence of rock, punk, and pop music on his work, and embracing his desire to shine as a more legible human presence within his cybernetic spreads of electronics, RXM Reality treats us to a vision of his music equally focused on concise songcraft and ballistic rave energy, all the while pushing his sound into a state of mind-bending total overload.

Meegan’s wide artistic practice has expanded along diverse trajectories since the release of Sick For You. His work as a graduate student in the music program at Northwestern University introduced him to new ideas in sound design and tech-enabled composition, leading him to explore new software and hardware that expanded the palette of ideas he could bring to life. His experience with the sound programming language of Max/MSP manifested in the glitched sounds of his new project When 2, which floats alongside RXM Reality as an outlet for more abstract plunderphonic deviations – as heard in Here, the project’s first album released through HausMo sub-label Blorpus Editions. Familiarity with game design software enabled him to sculpt sounds and visuals for video game and VR projects, opening new pathways outside of his purely musical work. Meegan also further awakened to the possibilities of collaborations between vocalists and producers through his work on the production side of NYC-based band Deli Girls’ self-titled album released in 2023, contributing his trademark overwhelming electronics to the band’s scream-soaked rave punk workouts.

With new skillsets and experiences to draw on, No. 1 in the World finds RXM Reality refreshed and eager to push the project into more vulnerable and direct means of expression. The album embraces “pop” songwriting across multiple oblique routes. His voice flits between bursts of snotty pop-punk sneer and sugary auto-tuned melodicism, contrasted track-by-track with moments of distorted screaming and mangled fragments of his own chopped and sampled voice. Intelligible melodies pop out of the chaos of his production, lilting across coherent scales and rising into climaxes along with layered synth arrangements. His compositions find more room than ever before for overt chord progressions and legible harmonic frameworks, often oriented around his guitar performances that hit like shoegaze or punk refracted through a funhouse mirror. Guest vocal appearances from former collaborator Dan Orlowski of Deli Girls and Hausu Mountain stalwart Fire-Toolz make perfect sense within the dense network of sound that RXM Reality lays out, landing like further variations within the ever-shifting palette of Meegan’s vocal styles.

For every moment that hits like a radio pop song transmitted to earth from a satellite a few years ahead of us in time, RXM Reality’s music finds room for passages of mix-swallowing breakcore percussion samples and glitched drum programming – elements that empower the songwriting around them with their unabashed turbulence. As he cherrypicks and recombines signifiers from a deep history of experimental electronic vocabularies, one might worry that Meegan’s production runs the risk of collapsing under its own weight, yet it speaks to his experience as a producer that every juxtaposed element hits the mix with a stunning degree of clarity and separation. No. 1 in the World segues through far-flung genres and styles without ever losing a sense of cohesion, rooted in Meegan’s palpable presence at the center of each track. The wide menu of shorter tracks repeatedly blasts listeners with quick transitions and shifts in mood and atmosphere, yet each upheaval feels natural – a hyperactive mind jettisoning one idea and picking up the thread of another at a pace that proves thrilling to follow along with. With No. 1 in the World, RXM Reality lets us trace his numerous distinct interests and compulsions as an electronic producer while opening the door for Meegan to express himself in new forms as a songwriter, an unlikely mutant pop star, a flesh-and-blood human being.