Mukqs - Stonewasher - New Cassette 2023 Hausu Mountain Tape - Chicago Electronic / Experimental /

On Stonewasher, Maxwell Allison achieves what he considers a level-up for the Mukqs project. While he approaches each Mukqs release with a specific genre and set of themes in mind, making albums that could be filed under harsh noise, video game music, aquatic electro / techno, intricate IDM programming, and hip-hop (in his duo producing for Chicago rapper Sharkula), Stonewasher turns the dial resolutely towards the realms of all-consuming glitch collage. The album’s improvised performance recorded live with no overdubs infuses the chaotic energy of a noise set into the dynamic narrative flow and tonal diversity of progressive electronic music. Mukqs never gives his spread of sounds a chance to settle, as sentimental melodies get swallowed by blasts of noise and shards of vocals cut into arrhythmic drum patterns. Allison performed the album live on a standalone sampler into which he recorded a library of original patterns from his arsenal of hardware synths and drum machines. Inspired by the vocal sample deconstruction of artists from Carl Stone to Burial, Allison sought to inject a grounding element into Stonewasher by fusing the dizzying palette of electronics with chopped samples of human voices culled from royalty-free a cappella videos on Youtube. If its final incarnation sounds overwhelming in its layered volleys of texture and rhythm, every sound that listeners hear resulted from the press of a button on Allison’s hardware sampler during a single live performance. This stubborn adherence to spontaneous creation using a limited palette of equipment has defined the Mukqs project from its inception, in all of its improvised mess and its moments of half-accidental complexity. If music is the opposite of seamless — all seams — then it begins to approach its own