We’re so excited to announce our next physical release! Zach Robinson has been one of our best buds and closest musical collaborators for years (we both play with him in a band called The Earth Is A Man). We remember being blown away by his earliest solo recordings as D/A/D, back when his dorm room served as his studio. His first full-length album under the D/A/D moniker, The Construct, demonstrates how far he’s come as a composer, guitarist, and synthesist since those sepia-toned days of yore four-ish years ago. Zach released The Construct online through Rossa Corsa Records earlier this year, and we’re lucky enough to be the ones responsible for its physical incarnation on the 3D universal grid. You can find more info about this release on our catalog page.

The album is available to order now in our e-shoppe, in limited editions of both cassette and CD, and will ship out starting next week.

You can stream the whole album at the D/A/D Bandcamp page, or in the embedded player below:

Hey buds,
We released a split cassette between Good Willsmith and Derek Rogers to commemorate Good Willsmith’s west coast tour this summer – and here we are, back home, with some copies left unpurchased. You can order this tape in the Hausu Mountain e-shoppe – it’s available now! The tape is limited to 100 copies – and we’re running low.

We’re very excited to announce the details of Good Willsmith’s next tour, which brings the band to the east coast for 5 shows in September as support for DATE PALMS!! These bills are crazy – we’re honored to play with some of our favorite contemporary zoners. Check out the dates, along with info on local support:

09.07.13 – Chicago, IL – Beat Kitchen w/ Kwaidan, Mind Over Mirrors

09.08.13 – Cleveland, OH – Now That’s Class w/ Moth Cock, DJ John Elliott

09.09.13 – Boston, MA – Store 54

09.10.13 – Philadelphia, PA – Kung Fu Necktie

09.11.13 – Brooklyn, NYC – Union Pool w/ Mountains, Plankton Wat

You can find all the details about these shows at each one’s Facebook event:
Chicago: https://www.facebook.com/events/317315638405203/
Cleveland: https://www.facebook.com/events/472500089513285/
Boston: https://www.facebook.com/events/1409887785897001/
Philadelphia: coming soon
Brooklyn: https://www.facebook.com/events/203001186528556/

Looking forward to seeing you out east!!

Hello and welcome! We’re so pleased to finally let you know about our next batch of tapes: the first four volumes of the Mugen Series! Infinite love to the guys at Tabs Out Cassette Podcast for premiering the series, and to Mike for his killer writeup. Check it out here.

Mugen Volume 1: MrDougDoug & Mukqs

Mugen Volume 2: TALsounds & Greyghost

Mugen Volume 3: Ron Tubman & Sugarm

Mugen Volume 4: Shingles & Josh Millrod

Each tape in the Mugen series features solo live performances from two artists, presented in single takes without overdubs. We make this distinction not to discredit other means of creation, but to identify recording conditions that these diverse sessions share. The eight musicians in the series approach their takes with different instruments in their hands, and structures (or lack thereof) in their brains – and they all produce sounds that might seem too dense to be the output of one human at one moment. But they aren’t really alone. Other brains help out, looping, processing, and layering live input: reactive synthesis, EHX2880 Multi-Track Loopers, auto-harmonizing frequency modulation, Boss RC20s, Line6 DL4s, way too much gear overall. Though the extent of the performers’ musical “educations” vary, certain masters provide overarching inspiration: Fripp and Eno’s tape loop collaborations, Klaus Schulze’s side-long synth odysseys, Terry Riley’s eternal swirling delay trails circa “Poppy Nogood.” These four tapes begin a series that we plan to continue indefinitely, adding more and more sessions to an already massive canon of tapes showcasing “one-take live drone / noise” and hoping something sticks out. If anything, the heads of the future will look back on Mugen and think “those young’uns were up to some weird shit.”

These tapes will ship on July 22nd, and they’re available to pre-order now from our e-shoppe! (Scroll down a little bit on the shop page to check out the MUGEN BUNDLE option – in the US, you can get all four tapes for $21 including shipping!)

ATTN: Hear ye! Bugle!

I know that you’re probably all like, “come on, more Big Ship stuff? Where them tapes at, Holmes?” But you better cool it, mister, because there are many more updates to be had.

We proudly present to you a video from one of our favorite collaborators, Brownshoesonly. Nick processed and edited home movies we found at Swap-O-Rama for the track “A Rabbit.”

Also mosey onto our store page to pre-order the LP or CD.

ZONES!

Exciting Announcements about The Big Ship!! The band’s debut album A Circle Is Forever comes into the world on March 26th on LP & CD!! The choice of which size disc to grip – 12 inches of analog or 4.75 inches of digital – is yours and yours alone. Both are available for Preorder in our e-shoppe!

The CD comes packaged in a white mini-LP jacket with liner labels and the LP cover image printed on the disc. – $10 US, $15 CAN/MEX, $17 RestOfWorld (These prices include shipping)

The LP edition features Coke Bottle Clear vinyl with Green Splatter, packaged in a hand-painted, hand-assembled tip-on sleeve, download code included. (Limited to 300 copies) – $15 US, $20 CAN/MEX, $25 RestOfWorld (These prices include shipping)

Either way, we know you won’t regret this sacred act of #commerce and we love you for supporting this project!! Thank You !!

ALSO: A Tour!! The Big Ship’s five-piece physical incarnation is heading out to the Great Eastern States of America for ten days of shows, driving, some breakfast foods, The Residents on the stereo, couches, shredding. Catch the band at these dates:

Sunday, 3/10 – Philadephia, PA – @ Kung-Fu Necktie

Tuesday, 3/12 – Richmond, VA – @ Steady Sounds

Wednesday, 3/13 – Baltimore, MD – @ Club K

Thursday, 3/14 – Manhattan, NYC – @ The Living Room

Friday, 3/15 – Brooklyn, NYC – @ TBA

Saturday, 3/16 – Philadephia, PA – @ Circle of Hope

Hope to see you guys on the road!!

xoooxoo

DOUG & MAX

We’re more than more than pleased to announce the release of our the first LP on Hausu Mountain: A Circle Is Forever by The Big Ship! You and I both know that the long highway into the cosmic womb of the Great Porpoise King is paved with cassette tapes, – but lo! the crafts traversing down those interplanetary lanes are built of the finest slabs of Coke Bottle Clear With Green Splatter Vinyl that #commerce has ever seen. (For serious, this was the first release we ever intended for our label – HAUSMO1 – and we’re proud to finally get it out into the world.)

Doug Kaplan and Aeron Small record music together as The Big Ship. The duo developed guitar techniques and musical interests in tandem for over a decade of their young lives, and diverged into solo performances for a split cassette right here on Hausu Mountain. The thirty-nine minutes of their debut LP A Circle Is Forever represent nine months of collaboration under the same roof – and the eternal love of fourteen years and counting. To stream the first cut from the album, “A Rabbit,” is to enter a succession of zones: multi-tracked guitar melodies, layered synth pads, acoustic flourishes, somewhere warm.

The duo’s live ensemble has expanded to include Max Allison – Doug’s bandmate in drone trio Good Willsmith and instrumental rockers The Earth is a Man – on bass and tape loops, and buds Matt Baer (on guitar) and Stephen Waller (on drums). Stay tuned for the dates of their East Coast tour this March.

Preorder A Circle Is Forever on LP our e-shoppe.

2012 was the Greatest and Only Year in Hausu Mountain history: we came into the world, began spreading the Eternal Wisdom of the Porpoise King, and released Three Albums of Music on Cassette Tape & One Album on Home Recorded Compact Disc. But this is only The Beginning, Folks. Behind our inexplicable cetacean fixation & Haphazard Internet capitAlization sit two human beings dedicated to documenting unusual sounds. This label owes its existence – conceptually and literally – to the artists we love & the inspiring music they produce. We try to demonstrate through our own practices that the record industry is far from “dead, man, like, I dunno maybe zombified & walking still but way brain dead.” We make a relatively miniscule amount of money from our releases, and we choose to feed whatever resources available to us into the biz as much as we can. This often means Buying Copious Amounts of Physical Media from our favorite musicians. (Note: This practice, when coupled with Listening to Copious Amounts of Physical Media, keeps music alive.)

These are Hausu Mountain’s Favorite Albums of 2012 – our most spun, most studied, most obsessed over, most talked about, most zoned-into releases of the year. Doug and Max share the top three albums – and their individual picks for #’s 4-25 follow.

After the apocalypse, when “noise” “music” (AKA “Noise Music”) overthrows pop and gangs of gas-masked Merzbow acolytes patrol the streets blaring feedback out of busted amps on the back of their ATVs, Aaron Dilloway will rise as the first musician canonized as a classical composer by the vestiges of the razed establishment. (AmIRight???) His manipulation of sound on the most elemental level (stretching pitches, repeating phrases infinitely with only the slightest variation, arranging disparate chunks into dynamic arcs) coupled with a massive sense of scope (an hour long 2xLP with two 18+ minute tracks) aligns him with big-name 20th century experimenters/tape loopers like Stockhausen, Xenakis, and Reich. The sounds themselves, though, are uniquely his own. Modern Jester attacks us with bursts of feedback, grinding metallic scrapes, primal thumps, mutated trills of some absent guitar (perhaps Robert Turman’s?), and his classic contact mic-ed vocalizations. But speculating on his sources is futile – and Dilloway’s exactly not telling us. The only credits on the similarly sublime After the Showers cassette – all songs from the same sessions as Modern Jester – list Dilloway’s wife as “voice” on every song, so she could very well be the sound source for all of this wildly diverse material. An advanced enough manipulator to dial in insane tones from simple sound sources, and an ambitious enough improviser-slash-loopsmith to build “songs” out of tiny sonic elements, Dilloway is a perfect example in our minds of Honing One’s Craft and Perfecting a Process. Add on his brilliant ear for mixing, his affection for analog media and sound sources, his aversion to overdubs, his physically visceral live performances, his extensive documentation of his own output, his prolific & highly quality-controlled release schedule (via Hanson Records and otherwise) – all that he is, we’d like to be. Modern Jester distills all of these qualities and manages to awe and excite us with every listen – it’s our favorite album of 2012.

In other news, Doug voted for Dilloway to be the president of our fair nation. It didn’t work out this year, but Dilloway For President 2016 sounds feasible.

Find this pup: the second LP pressing is available at the source.

2. Sutekh Hexen – Larvae [Handmade Birds] LP/CD (CS on Analog Worship)

An already much anthologized li’l tale: amid a stream of striking releases from 2010 onward, Sutekh Hexen revealed themselves to a burgeoning fanbase as San Franciscans / Oaklanders, instead of the Norwegian tundra-gods their output and Myspace page made them out to be. Regardless of geographical origin, the proof is in the blackened noise pudding with Larvae. The album feels like a longer-format showcase of the techniques and compositional decisions of their numerous earlier works – in the same vein as Dilloway approaching certain albums as explorations and others as culminations of fleshed-out ideas. Its long pieces feel like suites of Especially Brutal Sounds, veering from dark-ambient broodings into full-on tremolo-picked BM assaults into cavernous vocal noise with the Repeat knob cranked on the delay. As a small ensemble (a trio then, now a duo/sometimes trio) manipulating loops and effects to fuse the most extreme genre signifiers into layered, live-as-hell compositions, SH couldn’t help but influence our own output as Good Willsmith. We sent them a SoundCloud message on a limb when we were planning our first tour this summer and we received an immediate response: Kevin and Andy happily agreed to help us set up something, and we built a killer bill with them at the Hemlock Tavern that ended up being one of our best shows. We also met Cameron Shafii there, who’s releasing a Good Willsmith album on his label Merz Tapes – so it’s safe to say that the whole affair was real fateful. The inspiration we gleaned from Larvae and the band’s unexpected transformation from Purveyors of Mysterious Aural Hell into Extremely Nice Dudes and Friends made Sutekh Hexen one of 2012’s biggest influences on our little label.

Grip it: LP – nowhere, anymore. CS – from the source.

Putting our infinite feelings and thoughts about Dustin Wong into a blurb feels cheap but we’re going to try to do so with a minimum of hyperbole. Dreams Say, View, Create, Shadow Leads (henceforth DSVCSL) takes the solo Wong sound we know and love – near-symphonic “pop” songs generated from the ground up by layering guitar loops – and elevates it to the extreme: live takes of the most complex looping compositions this side of ever. Each song features 10+ layers of precise guitar work that Wong loops and stacks together in real time. Melodies conflate or collide with each other in the mix – some taking the spotlight in moments of climax, some allowed to run for the whole song as a harmonic basis for further shreddery. Wong’s output presents a unique fusion: his often sugar-sweet compositions & simple guitar tones could appeal to the most casual music listener, while his virtuosity and effect-pedal acrobatics provoke musicians/geeks into the misty-eyed praise you’re reading right at this very moment. The album is full with “Wow, What??” moments: the delay-knob melodies of “Evening Curves Straight,” the primal shouts of “Diagonally Talking Echo,” the succession of intensifying melodies on “Toe Tore Oh” (the year’s best song?? definitely one of our most listened to). But it’s the live-in-the-studio nature of DSVCSL that makes the album his most honest, immediate work so far. If you caught Wong on tour this year – perhaps on high-profile opening stints for Beach House or The Mountain Goats – you saw the album’s tracks built on stage just as they are on the record, delivered with the same degree of precision and, somehow, humility. Wong might be preternaturally gifted, but he never dips into pretension or showboatery. He’s a soft-spoken, fundamentally nice person who makes music simply because he loves to. Putting it lightly, he’s the most precise, dexterous, disciplined guitarist of our generation – and he’s done more to advance the art of looping and solo performance than anyone else in 2012.

Find it: on all formats from the source.

Doug’s Favorite Albums of 2012:

4. Guardian Alien – See the World Given to a One Love Entity [Thrill Jockey] LP/CD

5. Keith Fullerton Whitman – Generators [Editions Mego] LP

6. Oren Ambarchi – Raga Ooty/The Nilgiri Plateau [Bo’Weavil Recordings] LP

7. Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe – Timon Irnok Manta [Type] LP

8. Bitchin’ Bajas – Vibraquatic [Kallistei Editions] LP+DVD/CS

9. Sunn O)) – Rehearsal Demo Nov 11 2011 [Ideologic Organ/Southern Lord] LP

10. Zomes – Variations Vol. 1 [Imminent Frequencies] CS

11. Outer Space – Akashic Record (Events: 1986-1990) [Spectrum Spools] LP

12. The Caretaker – Patience (After Sebald) [History Always Favours The Winners] LP/CD

13. Pulse Emitter/Date Palms/Expo 70/Faceplant – 4 Way Split [Immune] LP

14. Sun Araw & M. Geddes Gengras Meet The Congos – FRKWYS Vol. 9: Icon Give Thank [RVNG Intl.] LP+DVD/CD+DVD

15. Evan Caminiti – Dreamless Sleep [Thrill Jockey] LP/CD

16. Ural Umbo – II [Merz Tapes] CS

17. Inner Tube – Inner Tube [Pacific City Sound Visions] LP

18. Locrian & Mamiffer – Bless Them That Curse You [Sige Records/Utech Records] 2xLP/CS/CD

19. Expo 70 – Journey Through Astral Projection [Immune] CS/CD

20. Golden Retriever – Occupied With The Unspoken [Thrill Jockey] LP/CD

21. Various Artists – Eight Trails, One Path [Three Lobed Recordings] LP

22. Pulse Emitter – Aeons [Aguirre Records] LP

23. Marielle V Jakobsons – Glass Canyon [Students Of Decay] LP/CD

24. Eternal Tapestry – A World Out Of Time [Thrill Jockey] LP/CD

25. Mutilation Rites – Empyrean [Gilead Media] LP

Max’s Favorite Albums of 2012:

4. Scott Walker – Bisch Bosch [4AD] 2LP/CD

5. Mount Eerie – Clear Moon [P.W. Elverum & Sun, Ltd.] LP

6. KTL – V [Editions Mego] 2LP/CD

7. Keiji Haino, Jim O’Rourke, Oren Ambarchi – Imikuzushi [Black Truffle] 2LP/CD

8. Hakobune – The Cowboy Across The River [Constellation Tatsu] CS

9. Mount Eerie – Ocean Roar [P.W. Elverum & Sun, Ltd.] LP

10. Oren Ambarchi – Audience Of One [Touch] LP/CD

11. Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe – Timon Irnok Manta [Type] LP

12. Sunn O)) – Rehearsal Demo Nov 11 2011 [Ideologic Organ/Southern Lord] LP

13. Keith Fullerton Whitman – Generators [Editions Mego] LP

14. Guardian Alien – See the World Given to a One Love Entity [Thrill Jockey] LP/CD

15. Oneohtrix Point Never/Rene Hell – Split [NNA Tapes] LP

16. Ricardo Donoso – Assimilating The Shadow [Digitalis Recordings] 2LP/CD

17. Converge – All You Love You Leave Behind [Deathwish] 2LP/CD

18. Derek Rogers – Saturations [Greenup Industries] LP

19. Ural Umbo – II [Merz Tapes] CS

20. Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! [Constellation] LP+7″/CD

21. Locrian & Mamiffer – Bless Them That Curse You [Sige Records/Utech Records] 2xLP/CS/CD

22. High Aura’d – Sanguine Futures [Bathetic Records] LP

23. Aluk Todolo – Occult Rock [The Ajna Offensive] 2xLP

24. Moth Cock – Moth Cock [Human Conduct] CS

25. Duane Pitre – Feel Free [Important Records] LP/CD

Hey Buds,

We’re ecstatic to announce that Good Willsmith’s album “14 Years of Desperate Research” will be released on cassette by the incomparable Merz Tapes !! Infinite thanks to Cameron Shafii for working with us to get this music out into the world. We’ve got some big plans for this release’s physical incarnation – stay tuned: It should be available in early 2013! Check out the cover art designed by Doug & Max below:

Also – in the interest of archiving our first year as a band, we uploaded a set we recorded in May at WNUR in Evanston for the Airplay live series. This recording happened within the same few weeks as the session that yielded our tape “Is The Food Your Family Eats Slowly.” You’ll hear some similar gear in use, and some similar tactics employed, but this set is a horse_ebook of a different color entirely. Check out the #rare, undoctored Eno JPEG we discovered in the darkest annals of The Web & used as the cover art:

Hey: there are >5 copies left of the tour-only hand-numbered CDr of this release available in our e-shoppe.

You can stream or download (pay what you want) both of these albums from our Bandcamp right now:

www.hausumountain.bandcamp.com

With these releases, Good Willsmith put out four albums in 2012 !! …but could a fifth be on the horizon??

“The Big Ship” is a song by Brian Eno. Doug Kaplan and Aeron Small are two Eno enthusiasts who make music together as The Big Ship. In contrast to “A Circle Is Forever,” their forthcoming full-length LP brimming with synth textures, multi-tracked guitar melodies, and layered samples, The Big Ship’s “Split” cassette presents each of these young men alone with his guitar in an extended live-in-the-studio session. On Side A, Doug constructs slow-churning loops of processed guitar drone, propelling depth charges down into the Marianas Trench and provoking seabeasts out of their maritime slumber.  “The Suboceanic Mantle” evolves from an ominous hum into a nocturnal, predatory “No Pussyfooting” in congress with the Kraken. Side B finds Aeron engaging in maximum delay worship, feeding melody after melody into the mix and watching bright-eyed as leads ripple off into sweet decay. “Bowshock at the Heliosphere” channels the lush loop-work of Mark McGuire and Dustin Wong – eking out a nebula, note by note, in a hushed corner of the cosmos.

You can stream or download The Big Ship’s “Split” right now on Bandcamp.:

www.thebigshipband.bandcamp.com

Or own a pro-dubbed, imprinted physical copy on cassette tape (C28) – available to order in the Hausu Mountain e-shoppe and shipping immediately.

The Big Ship’s “A Circle Is Forever” will be available on LP in early 2013 – for now, check out a preview of the album’s first track, “A Rabbit,” on SoundCloud.