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M. Geddes Gengras, “Guest List” (Hausu Mountain, 2026)

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This ambitious and aptly titled new album from upstate NY synth wizard M. Geddes Gengras is something akin to a wild and eccentric game of the surrealist parlor game Exquisite Corpse, as Gengras handed off his raw synth recordings to a wide and varied array of collaborators and offered them “creative carte blanche” for their additions (albeit with minimal instructions). The idea is a playful and somewhat ingenious expansion upon how Gengras’ beloved modular synthesizers work, as “each new element added to the chain affects the whole, which can produce unexpected results.” As evidenced by this album, the same is definitely true of collaborators as well, yet Gengras also took inspiration from other chance-based composition strategies such as John Cage’s I-Ching experiments or Autechre’s complex algorithmic mutations. As far as I know, however, no indeterminacy-inspired composers ever recorded an album quite like this one, as Guest List is a charmingly playful and freewheeling fun house of wild and audacious aesthetic collisions and juxtapositions.

In a way, Guest List seems like an album that Gengras was always destined to make, as his entire career has been eclectic, freewheeling, and collaboration-filled, as I first encountered him through his seemingly ubiquitous presence on every good Not Not Fun project in the early 2000s and he has since blown me away at least once with both his outsider techno alias (Personable) and his collected Moog works. He has also taken quite a deep dive into Jamaican dub production techniques with Sun Araw’s Cameron Stallones, as the two launched the dancehall imprint Duppy Gun after collaborating with The Congos in 2011. In short, Gengras is a guy who has seemingly tried his hand at damn near every possible strain of arty underground music at this point.

Unsurprisingly, not all of those directions were quite meant to be, so there have been several Gengras albums over the years that were very much not my scene at all. Given that, each new album or fresh project is basically an “all bets are off” scenario for me and Guest List distills that career-long creative roulette wheel into just a single album. Fittingly, it features plenty of surprises and a similarly unpredictable hit-to-miss ratio, but one of those many surprises is that there are so few stylistic traces of Gengras’ chameleonic past in his own synth parts, as Guest List would probably fall on the more ambient/New Age end of the synth spectrum if all of the non-synth tracks were carved away (which is roughly where I would expect a current Gengras solo album to land). While I have no idea if Gengras was feeling creatively blocked before embarking upon this album, this collaborative “it takes a village” approach certainly seems like a brilliant remedy if he was, as a lot of these pieces ultimately wound up in impressively fresh terrain nowhere near where they started.

For me, Gengras’ biggest stroke of genius was his decision to enlist some absolutely killer drummers for this project, as Otto Hauser ’s intense freeform drumming launches the jazzy “Motore” into the stratosphere, while Greg Fox unleashes one hell of a clattering whirlwind in the twinkling “Seven Dials.” Elsewhere, the languorous post-rock of “The List Is Millions Long” benefits greatly from Colin Blanton’s “funky drummer” heroics, while the blown-out hip-hop of “Soup” swaps out a live drummer for some wild “bitcrushed boom-bap.” In the non-percussive realm, Six Organs’ Ben Chasny teams up with Gengras for the mesmerizing “Laplace/Montagne,” as an understated and unhurried guitar reverie gradually becomes enveloped in a swirling and swooping maelstrom of synth sounds. I also dug the tragically brief “Bad Transport,” which resembles an instrumental and dramatically less morose Portishead, as a trippy squall of guitars, clarinets, and electronics unfolds over a slow and sensuous vamp.

Naturally, there are plenty of other interesting performances strewn throughout the album as well, as damn near every song features new collaborators from varying backgrounds. In particular, I was impressed by Will Epstein’s soulful and post-coital sounding sax in “The List Is Millions Long“ and WANDA GROUP’s rambling and enigmatic monologue in “The Weather,” yet this whole album is a wonderfully drifting and disorienting swirl of inventive genre mutations that feels effortlessly unstuck in time, as the charmingly chaotic parade of influences covers everything from ‘80s art punk to jazz to hip-hop to “early Pro Tools” luminaries like Tortoise and Joan of Arc. In fact, the only truly consistent thread that runs through everything is an endearingly sincere desire to explore unexpected new directions and make an album that feels like a fun underground music house party in which every guest brings a fresh splash of color to an eclectic and shapeshifting all-night jam.

Listen here.

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Moth Cock, “Whipped Stream and Other Earthly Delights” (Hausu Mountain, 2022)

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I doubt anyone can truly say that they know what to expect from a new Hausu Mountain release, but I still felt a bit gobsmacked by the latest from this ambitiously unhinged Ohio duo. While it may read like hyperbole to the uninitiated, the label’s claim that Whipped Stream is a “durational smorgasbord of new music capable of knocking even the most seasoned zoner onto their ass” feels like an apt description of this triple cassette behemoth of fried and kaleidoscopic derangement (it clock in at roughly 3½ hours, after all). As I have not yet been lucky enough to experience Moth Cock’s cacophonous sensory onslaught live, I was also a bit stunned to learn that most or all these pieces were culled from real-time performances. I honestly do not comprehend how two guys armed with a sax, loop pedals, and a “decades-old Electribe sampler / drum machine” can whip up such a vividly textured and wildly imaginative hurricane of sound so quickly and organically, as there seems to be some real hive mind shit afoot with these dudes.

Unsurprisingly, I am at a loss to find a succinct description to explain what transpires over the course of this singular opus, but most of Whipped Stream can be reasonably described as a gnarled psychedelic freakout mashed together with Borbetomagus-style free jazz, the ’80s noise tape underground, and jabbering sound collage lunacy. In the wrong hands, such an outré stew coupled with such an indulgent duration would be an effective recipe for total unlistenability, but I’ll be damned if Moth Cock have not emerged from this quixotic endeavor looking like fitfully brilliant visionaries. I should add the caveat that Moth Cock also seem willfully annoying at times, but it is rare that such bumps in the road are not ultimately transformed into a near-perfect mindfuck or something unexpectedly sublime.

It did not take long at all for me to fall in love with this album, as the opening “Castles Off Jersey” is an absolute tour de force that starts off as a layered and trippy homage to Terry Riley-esque sax-driven drone and only gets deeper and weirder from there. Along the way, it makes stops at gnarled, howling noise and burbling kosmische synth en route to an impressively apocalyptic and layered crescendo of swirling orchestral samples and electronic chaos. The following “Threefer Thursday” is still more bananas, calling to mind the viscous, squirming synths of Rashad Becker’s Traditional Music Of Notional Species series before throwing sleepy Hawaiian slide guitar into the mix for an exotica nightmare. It’s an audaciously sanity-dissolving collision, but that is merely the jumping off point into an unexpectedly gorgeous stretch of warm, woozy chords…and then the bottom drops out again for a finale of cold, churning industrial-damaged psychedelia that feels like it could have been plucked from a live Throbbing Gristle performance.

In the wake of that wonderful opening salvo of hits, “Invisible Pranks” makes the album’s first deep plunge into willfully obnoxious territory, as it feels like a manically jabbering locked groove for its first few minutes, but the second half blossoms into ghostly and lysergic drone magic. That piece also illustrates one of the album’s defining traits: the end of these songs is often unrecognizably different from the beginning, yet Moth Cock somehow make such dramatic and maniacal transformations feel organic and seamless. Moreover, all of their genre-splicing madness is almost invariably distinctive and dazzlingly inventive–rather than feeling like a gleeful parade of crazed pastiches, Whipped Stream feels like five different impossibly cool bands all out to blow my goddamn mind.

In fact, my notes for even the lesser songs are an amusing cavalcade of colorful phrases like “alien tuba nightmare,” “Beefheart-inspired talent show at a mental hospital,” “laser-strafed marching band on a tropical vacation,” “children’s song divebombed by psychotropic ghosts as an arcade throws up,” and “an acoustic guitarist jamming with some elephants and an absolutely deranged doorbell buzzer.” Also: “new age album invaded by a gibbering herd of malfunctioning toy dogs.” Needless to say, such terrain is very much not for everybody, but it sure feels like nirvana to me, as I never have any idea what the hell is going to happen next and nearly all of it ends up being totally unlike anything I have heard before (and much of it rules). In general, the longer pieces tend to be the most inventive and rewarding, but this whole album is a god-tier rabbit hole of playfully broken-brained mindfuckery built upon a partially concealed scaffolding of killer musicianship, sophisticated avant garde sensibilities, and flashes of otherworldly beauty.

Listen here.