MrDougDoug - SOS Forks AI REM II - New Cassette 2023 Hausu Mountain Tape - Chicago Electronic / Midi / Freak Shit

SOS Forks AI REM II bears the fruit of Doug Kaplan’s longstanding quest to push his MrDougDoug project to a level of bewildering “all-over-the-place-core” MIDI programming and plunderphonic trickery. He stands at the gate in a top hat and tie-dye tails inviting us into a rare zone where vocaloid Animal Crossing sludge metal and minimalism like Philip Glass sit side by side with synthetic air horns and simulated burps. Kaplan builds his tracks on the frameworks of MIDI files salvaged from the Internet Archive’s Geocities MIDI Collection, weaving together structures from the unearthed scraps of all manner of songs from the traditions of rock, jazz, nü metal, country, and more. Kaplan harnesses soundfonts from video games released on Super Nintendo and N64, disfiguring the familiar tones and sound effects of those consoles through pitch-shifting and effect manipulation into carnivalesque curlicues or passages of majestic consonance. Kaplan’s meticulous process of recombining MIDI files and programming voices works in consort with his Merry Prankster nature to produce music that is at once baroque and, as he himself would tell you, often utterly annoying in its delivery – a maniacal orchestra offering up moment after moment of “???” and “lol wtf”. Despite the in-the-box software-based nature of his album’s creation, he pursued processes that would inject pure chance and unpredictable deviations into what could have manifested as antiseptic digital music. MrDougDoug’s vision of the present-as-future leads us away from the iridescent towers looming over the would-be utopian landscape and squirrels us down the tunnel to his deranged clown dimension. The wonders he presents to us down there can’t help but bear the humor and irreverence that he brings to his art practice – a mindset, coupled with that of Mukqs, that has come to define the output of Hausu Mountain as a whole.