Hourloupe - Three Nights in the Wawayanda (Self Release)

What Your Ears Say & The Cover Looks Like

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What We Say

Great to see Hourloupe back with more avant-garde spoken word musings on "time, reality, and the natural world". Here they reflect on humanity's journey from a moment in 19th century natural history to staring transfixed at the anthropocene headlights. Fear not the poetic narration is as warm & reassuring as a first world lifestyle & the music it's own, frankly mesmerizing, complex electroacoustic ecosystem with only the occasionally unsettling hint of it's impending breakdown.

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What The Release Notes Say

CASSETTE WILL BE AVAILABLE VIA TYMBAL TAPES IN APRIL. KEEP AN EYE OUT HERE: TYMBALTAPES.BANDCAMP.COM

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"At the house party on Saturday night Miss Cole boasted of catching rabbits. A trek ensued and she and Mister Carter, still in formal attire, set off spending three nights in the Wawayanda."

From this late-nineteenth-century newspaper society column comes Three Nights in the Wawayanda, the final release in a triptych of Hourloupe records exploring time, reality, and the natural world. TNW isn’t a narrative of hapless, hungover merrymakers wandering a 19th-century wilderness but a reflection on nature at the historical moment it is being given over to the forces that lead us to our current situation: industry and violence.

Like its predecessors, TNW tells its story through doublings and mirroring. Mister Carter and Miss Cole cross-dress as each other. A parallel couple — a man of charcoal and a man of chalk — appear, and an unnamed pair makes their escape at the end to a mysterious “other state.” A luminous entry from Henry David Thoreau’s diary ("The Dance of No History") describes the daylight and moonlight in a beautiful, strange equilibrium. Male merges with female, female male; one carbonized being meets his chalk-dusted opposite. Everything strives toward existential balance at a moment when balance in nature is being obliterated forever.

Threading through the compositions are boxing tortoises ("Tortoise Boxing"), a postcard that grows to envelop the woods ("Postcard Found in the Woods"), a crew sailing the ship of a forest lost to a flood ("Green Navy/Rain"), and a frozen lake that becomes an outdoor club ("The Dancefloor/Beat Crush"). The temperature rises, the dance floor crumbles, and the contents of your pocket on the night you die — lint, a lone pearl, a piece of flint — seem to guide everyone’s action, even God’s.

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A few years ago, explorers studying cenotes, the now submerged, underground ritual spaces of the Maya, concluded that, taken together, they represented a coordinated settlement — a kind of negative city — paralleling the spectacular urban centers they created above ground in daylight.

A hidden night city is this Hourloupe triptych, which "Three Nights in the Wawayanda" completes:
--"Future Deserts" with its digital paleography;
--"Sleepwalker" with its rambles through dark rooms of consciousness including Descartes's skull;
--"Three Nights in the Wawayanda" with its partygoers in soiled tuxes and algae-gummed gowns, wandering a 19th-century wilderness on the verge of the industrial age.

All three are concerned with time, how it stretches and bends the mind and how it binds and condemns the body. And all three explore the debt we owe one another as bodies cohabitating the planet in time.

CREDITS
Frank Menchaca & Anar Badalov
Painting on cover: Frank Menchaca