Earth To Momma LP Release with Hairbone and Odwalla1221

Hairbone is a New York-based power trio of artists Raúl de Nieves, Jessie Stead, and Nathan Whipple, formerly known as Haribo. Functioning mainly in the art world, Hairbone has inflicted their carnivalesque live shows upon audiences from museums to decrepit basements for nearly a decade. Each unique, narrative multimedia performance features frontman de Nieves inhabiting new personae in a sculptural actionist mode, brandishing oversized, text-emblazoned props as if they were picket signs, then proceeding to destroy them as Hairbone’s near-opera burlesque freak shows unfurl. Obliquely political, theirs is a protest music without didacticism.

Despite Hairbone’s prolific, obsessively-documented life as a performance art group, Earth To Momma is the band’s first studio LP, distilling their sprawling live shows into 12 distinct pieces of lyrical, art-damaged rock and pop music. Their institutional success begs for comparisons to artists’ bands like Destroy All Monsters or Die Tödliche Doris, but Hairbone’s confusion of high and low culture fits them equally into peerdom with the classic American underground of the Butthole Surfers and Sun City Girls. A native of Mexico, de Nieves delivers bilingual incantations that are bolstered by Stead’s synthetic drum sampling and guitarist Whipple’s acid-fried neoclassical shredder excess. The record is a shapeshifting suite that fits veiled commodity critique, volcanic convulsions, blasé songcraft, and a breezy instrumental into a hallucinatory vision haunted by abject clowns and the grain of twisted emergency police calls. With tongue set firmly in cheek—through Stead’s ode to Chateau Diana bodega “wine product,” and de Nieves’s simulated Kim Gordon sighting—Hairbone maintain an irreverent authenticity in an era when the mere notion has become a barren field.

Odwalla1221 are the Los Angeles-based collagecore duo of Chloé Maratta and Flannery Silva, who formed as Odwalla88 in 2013 while art students in Baltimore. Emerging from the city’s warehouse noise scene, Odwalla stitch drum pads, sampler, and voice into a patchwork aesthetic more akin to the legacy of sound poetry. Maratta and Silva’s disjointed arrangement of language enters into cut-and-paste mantra, their deadpan inflections of discrete verbal units repeated for hypnotic reflections—“a / perfect / recipe / for / a / choker / one / ribbon / one / safety / pin / one / carnation / bloom.” Odwalla’s poetic cadence echoes their sampler’s logic, the duo’s mechanical call-and-response chants blurring lines of dialogue between machine and friendship. In their synchronized performances, these permuted utterances and roll-call lists of fashion accessories and sororal allies are jabbed, back and forth together, atop unhinged bursts of stuttered samples for an incisive composite of text and minimal sound that is always unmistakably their own. The creation of merch also plays a central role in Odwalla’s output and both members maintain individual visual art practices, with recent exhibitions by Maratta at Queer Thoughts and Silva at Karma International and Kimberly-Klark.