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Hausu Mountain's New Tape Batch Is a Surreal Soundtrack for Your Weed Holiday

The Chicago label's 'Cool Zones' set features releases from Forced into Femininity, Rick Weaver, Khaki Blazer, and Sug

No matter the ostensible scene or style of a given release on the Chicago experimental label Hausu Mountain, the music'ssort of spiritually united. It's hazy, organic, surreal, smoky, and absurdist—even occasionally a little paranoid. It's the stuff that you want to pass around to your friends once you've experienced it yourself. What I'm trying to say is that it's no accident that they picked today (aka 4/20, aka "The Weed Day") to announce their new batch of tapes. I mean, one of the first emails I ever got from Max Allison and Doug Kaplan was about a video one of their artists made that featured them rolling around in five pounds of the stuff (my response at the time: "That's a lot of weed!").

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And so today, they've very appropriately decided to share the news of a particularly big haul of forthcoming releases, a batch they're calling Cool Zones (out on May 19). It features tapes from new and returning artists to the HausMo stable, including Forced into Femininity, Rick Weaver, Khaki Blazer, and Sug.

Rick Weaver—also a member of Form a Log, who released a mind-expanding split with Moth Cock on the label last year—reemerges on the imprint with "Tin Tan (Mono)," a bitter taste from his new tape The Secular Arm. It's a dizzily sickening, layering of a number of different distorted synth sounds. The experience is sorta like trying to ride two carousels at once.

Forced into Femininity is the moniker of the Chicagoan multimedia artist Jill Lloyd Flanagan. Heterochromea's her first release on Hausu Mountain, but the blender-violence of "I Was a Woman" is as hyperreal as anything in the catalog—and it's existentially crushing to boot!

Khaki Blazer is the recording project of Ohio beat shredder Pat Modugno—the other half of Moth Cock. Last year, when I wrote something about the brain-liquefying power of Black Dice, someone tweeted at me, simply, that Khaki Blazer was better. While I'm not here to pit artists against one another, "Passive Demon," the first single from his new tape Didn't Have to Cut makes another pretty good case that Modugno is better than most people operating in the world of noisy electronic deconstruction. It's the sort of piece that's continually surprising—just when you think you've traced the outline, Modugno rips it all up and starts again.

Finally, but certainly no less stonily baffling than the rest is the new release from Sug, the new moniker of sound artist Mike Sugarman. The tape's called God's Clit Vol. 2: TIME vs. FLESH, and if the suggestion of degradation and cosmic pleasure isn't enough to get you to hit play, know that the new track "A Pig in Shit" is as distorted and depraved as its title suggests.

So yeah, that's a lot to work through, but it's a holiday—you've got time. Listen to all of those tracks up above, and head over to buy the whole batch at the Hausu Mountain site.