The fourth annual Afrofuturist Weekend comes to Elastic Arts from Friday, October 22, through Sunday, October 24, with evening programs on Friday and Saturday and daytime programs on Saturday and Sunday. The festival’s organizers describe it as a “celebration of Black artists making forward-looking work that envisions radically positive futures for Black people,” and in […]
Tag: Hausu Mountain
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TALsounds and Matchess braid their music together on the debut of Damiana
TALsounds and Matchess braid their music together on the debut of Damiana, Chi-ROCK Nation celebrate hip-hop heritage with a monthlong exhibit, and more.
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Arc Mountain is the underground-label collaboration you’ve been waiting for
Like doesn’t necessarily breed like—just ask all the friends for whom I’ve tried (and failed) to play cupid. But similarity is bliss for underground labels Deathbomb Arc and Hausu Mountain, which collaborated to release the compilation Arc Mountain on May 7. Based respectively in Los Angeles and Chicago, these eclectic, irreverent labels might be separated […]
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Mukqs documents pandemic living on My Most Personal Album to Date
The multifarious outlets of Chicago experimental musician Maxwell Allison include the solo project Mukqs and the improvisational ambient trio Good Willsmith, whose Twitter account he uses to opine about music. His incisive comments on the granular details of his daily listening make it clear he’s had the experience of loving a song while hating how […]
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Good Willsmith return with an acid-fried live album
Good Willsmith return with an acid-fried live album, Cinchel drops an ambient cassette that doubles as an art object, and more.
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Beloved DIY space Situations signs off with a Halloween livestream
Beloved DIY space Situations signs off with a Halloween livestream, and Angel Marcloid drops an album of fizzy jazz fusion as Nonlocal Forecast.
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Chicago rock pranksters BBsitters Club can party with the best riffers around
In 2012, Chicago musicians Max Allison and Doug Kaplan launched the eclectic label Hausu Mountain, which has grown into one of the city’s best indies. It also acts as an umbrella for many of its founders’ projects: Hausu Mountain has released the ambient-adjacent sounds Allison and Kaplan have made with Natalie Chami (aka TALsounds) as […]
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Ben Baker Billington’s Quicksails builds whole worlds from serene synths
Many prolific musicians call Chicago home, but multi-instrumentalist Ben Baker Billington is a veritable Energizer Bunny. He’s been contributing otherworldly experimental sounds to the scene since his mid-aughts stint in noise project Druids of Huge, and his musical resumé is too long to reproduce in full here. Any outre artist looking for an open-minded collaborator […]
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Why do indie musicians put up with penny payouts?
Streaming your favorite artists’ music is the least helpful way to support them. But they can’t abandon those platforms, because we won’t.
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Fire-Toolz captures the many colors of the rainbow bridge
Chicago experimentalist Angel Marcloid tries to contain the fractured emotional spectrum of loss with an album for her dead cat.
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Mavis Staples drops a benefit single to help Chicago seniors survive the pandemic
Mavis Staples drops a benefit single to help Chicago seniors survive the pandemic, Mukqs embarks on a weekly series of live-recorded experimental EPs, and more.
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Chicago producer RXM Reality drops an inspiringly restless and endlessly explosive new album
Enforced mass social isolation can really make you crave constant stimuli. As each day feels longer than the one before, the slow crawl of hours makes the frenetic dance music on Blood Blood Blood Blood Blood—the latest howler from Chicago-based producer RXM Reality, aka Mike Meegan—sound like a salve. It’s Meegan’s sixth album under that […]
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When Christmas music passes beyond human comprehension
As Pepper Mill Rondo, Max Allison and Doug Kaplan find the horrifying and the sublime in holiday kitsch.
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Fire-Toolz makes extreme easy-listening music for rabid cartoon fish
Chicago sound artist, multi-instrumentalist, and noise weirdo Angel Marcloid creates meticulously teetering collages out of vivisected bits of various incongruous genres under several different monikers. She’s already put out two albums this year: March’s Bubble Universe! (Hausu Mountain), where she appears as Nonlocal Forecast, has a gently frothy ambience that verges on jazzy fusion before […]
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Sharkula and Mukqs: two weird sounds that go down easy together
Outsider rapper Sharkula and oddball electronic artist Mukqs make a surprisingly approachable collaborative EP.