As the old adage goes: another arbitrary period of years, another HausMo Mixtape. Doug Kaplan and Maxwell Allison, heads of the Chicago-based experimental label Hausu Mountain and members of projects like Good Willsmith and Pepper Mill Rondo, scroll back through the label’s recent catalog for the second installation of their compilation series. While 2018’s HausMo Mixtape I sourced music from around 80 releases from the label’s first five years on this big ole blue ball, HausMo Mixtape II culls from the pool of releases that have appeared from 2018 to mid-2020. With the HausMo biscuit factory churning out the goods at a more competent and prolific rate than ever, it’s no surprise that this relatively short period contains untold depths of freak magic. Cooked up by a stable of artists both deeply rooted in the label’s catalog and new to the family, the compilation’s 22 tracks lay out a body of far-flung styles and idiosyncratic visions that manage, like all of the label’s releases, to make some twisted sense when framed together. Featuring everything from progressive avant-electronics to fried free-jazz noise to gonzo pop deconstruction to ornate jazz fusion to to pure ambient drift — to as many possible descriptors as there are numbers in the catalog — what HausMo releases share is the same as what drives Kaplan and Allison: a “chaotic good” motivation to entertain their listeners while challenging them in equal measure. Like a nice return to a familiar routine, listeners know that their next trip to Hausu Mountain will yield music consistent only in its unpredictability, committed to a benevolent strain of confusion.
