Happy Hardcore and The End of The World: In Conversation With Hudson Mohawke
His first LP in seven years, Hudson Mohawke’s new record: Cry Sugar will drown you in goosebumps, if not an insatiable curiosity about its palpable vibrancy. I had the pleasure of speaking with Hudson, a.k.a. music producer Ross Birchard, to figure out why these songs made me lose my mind.
We dove into ‘Happy Hardcore’, the maximalist genre behind his first rave memories in Glasgow that root his album with such explosive energy, you don’t know if you’re gonna start bleeding out or survive an extra decade. He fell in love with its playful chaos early on and tells me “you can’t get rid of the stuff you loved as a kid.” As he got older, he hated that it was seen as satire music and cut through that industry bullshit with razor-sharp teeth. His tolerance for industry bullshit remains low. Hudson’s trademarked high-definition trap beats and abstract genre-bending underpin projects from heavyweights like Kanye, FKA twigs, and Drake, but he burst through the confines of commercial status at 10-speed.
Hudson and I talked about euphoria, melancholy, pain, and unbridled joy. I asked him how he’s able to convey so much emotion through sound and he tells me he starts by allowing himself to feel moved. HudMo paraphrased a Vangelis quote (the late film composer) about the way art enters and moves through a person, from the universe per say, when they’re creating things they just enjoy personally. I almost made a joke about how he’d been in LA too long. Before I could, he’d already started laughing at himself for sounding like “fucking woowoo nonsense” in a way. Although when you first taste the ethereal spirit that emanates from Cry Sugar, Vangelis’ sentiment not only takes immediate shape, but only scratches the surface of providing an explanation for the otherworldly character of this album.
As unearthly as these tracks feel – begging you to step outside of your skin while on a dead-sober morning commute, Cry Sugar is inspired by our very real, live cultural landscape. Mohawke credits the “deranged technicolor of American decadence” as the force behind moments that speak to our society’s rushed pursuits of pleasure— that inevitably bleed into pain. Take ‘KPIPE’, the apocalyptic anthem that sounds like once god fearing Christians after entering Walmart on Black Friday. But it’s against the grimy backdrop of late capitalism that Hudson says he is able to intricately capture the mood of our time in all of its “high highs” and “low lows.” In the end, ethereal vocal samples, overdriven kicks, and whirring synths arm us with the cheek to look the end of the world in the eye, kick it in the nuts, and offer a McDonald’s french fry.
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Visuals courtesy of WARP Records
