Tiger Village - The Celebration (CD) |

Cleveland-based producer Tim Thornton makes music under the moniker Tiger Village. Thornton has carved out a niche in the American experimental underground through the wide-spanning releases of his own label Suite 309, as well as through his day job as a quality control supervisor at the Gotta Groove Records manufacturing plant — meaning that his ears serve as the finish line for a vast slate of vinyl projects that hit the market every year. The Celebration, the fourth Tiger Village release on Hausu Mountain since 2014, joins a catalog that includes releases on Orange Milk, Patient Sounds, and HausMo sublabel Blorpus Editions, along with a battery of music self-released through Suite 309. Within the jittering IDM-adjacent networks of The Celebration, Thornton expands his craft on multiple concurrent trajectories, digging deeper into complex drum programming and labyrinthine synth arrangement while further exploring passages of vocal synthesis and non-recursive song structures that thrive on unpredictability and constant fluctuation. Thornton can’t help but bring a wide-eyed curiosity to anything he produces, as he rejects the dead-serious gun-metal intensity of many strains of contemporary electronic production in favor of bright tones and wonky rhythms. Like fellow Hausu Mountain artists Wobbly and Moth Cock, Tiger Village revels in cheeky compositional about-faces and carnivalesque synth lines. In all their staccato voices and peals of abstract texture, Thornton’s tracks blur the lines between harmonic electronic elements and drum patterns. The album morphs before our ears every few seconds or so, allowing arrhythmic loops and alternating rhythmic grids to contrast against whatever might seem to be the bedrock of any given piece. By paying attention to the trajectory of every dollop of sound, Tiger Village pulls off magic tricks in his pointillist arrangements in which nothing remains static — everything pushes towards a state of progressive complication.

• Format Detail: CD Mini-LP Jacket, Artwork By Maxwell Allison
• Format: CD
• Label: Hausu Mountain
• Catalog Number: CD-HAUSMO-137