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.
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