Hauras

Hauras

Pervades

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Head to the western neighborhoods of San Francisco, and the city becomes a very quiet place after midnight. By 3am, one can almost hear the fog spilling past the sodium lights that illuminate a lonesome street corner at Judah and 15th. Whatever soundtracks that emerge from that time and that place inevitably embody that nocturnal atmosphere, a narcoleptic weariness, a waking dream of the insomniac. Such is the psychogeographical realm as channeled through sound for Hauras, the obliquely musical concern for San Franciscan Howard Ryan. In Pervades, Hauras returns to the fragments of guitar warbling through chains of echo and flange, his Basinski-esque loops of crushingly sad ambient melody, his EVP impressionistic vocals, and his curious interruptions from scanner radio. More than before, he expresses a confidence in his oblique craftsmanship that allows him to push the sounds to include a very compelling drum machine plus guitar noise track in "Stellaged." Richard Youngs, Gate, and Graham Lambkin all come to mind, as does the terminally obscure project Dial (Jacqui Ham's post-Ut band of similarly late nite expressionism). Pervades concludes a trilogy of recordings made during the pandemic era, that also includes In These Coming Days (2020) and The Glare of the Nave (2021). Inspired by Rinko Kawauchi and Audrey Szasz. Mastered by Brian Pyle

Hauras

The Glare Of The Nave

Helen Scarsdale Agency

Hauras returns to the Helen Scarsdale Agency for a second missive of blurred and broken song. The name translates from Finnish as ‘fragile,’ and that remains an apt psychological space for the construction and composition of The Glare Of The Nave. Howard Ryan, the San Francisco citizen behind the Hauras moniker, composed this album in seclusion during the second year of the pandemic. It’s a crumpled album from a crumpled time. Ryan conjures his fragments of guitar, keys, scanner, and voice as if they transmit from behind the radiator. His tone and dissonance appear amorphous at first, swollen with an emotional weariness; but through subtle variations on repetition, his songs dilate into existence. These remain adjacent to the rough-hewn smears of Michael Morley’s Gate and the idiosyncrasies of Graham Lambkin. In his own words, Ryan articulates the exact mood behind this album as such: “I have been interested lately in how our communities change during a time like this. Relationships that are forged because of the crisis and those that have been abandoned. My work as Hauras has always been focused on the psychology of society at the end of civilization, and now that the seams are not only loosened but tearing, this new music attempts to explore the sudden terror and extreme quiet that has become our every day.” Inspired by Lav Diaz and Cecilia Vicuña. Mastered by Bob Bellerue.

Hauras

In These Coming Days

Helen Scarsdale Agency

Hauras is the newly christened project for Howard Ryan, an idiosyncratic San Francisco musician who had previously operated under the Snickers moniker. This new name Hauras translates from the Finnish as ‘fragile,’ and a certain fragility exists as a dialectic condition to Ryan’s strange sounds. The argument could be made that Ryan is a deconstructionist of the archetypal ‘rock’ song, dissembling it into eerie echoes of guitar noise and narcoleptic vocals, something akin to Michael Morely’s work as Gate or a particular vein within Richard Youngs’ vast oeuvre (coincidentally, Ryan has collaborated with Youngs).  At the same time, one could easily defend the position that Ryan is an alchemist, assembling the base elements of tone and dissonance that always manage to self-manifest into the sonic equivalent of a homunculus, thus appearing similar to the perverse occlusions of Death & Beauty Foundation, one of the more enigmatic projects of England’s hidden reverse. From either position, the results from Hauras are peculiar, strange, and often uncanny. Once brought (into) existence, musical forms crumble and fall apart in real time through intransitive mantras of repetitive guitar strum and the occasionally whispered vocal incantation.  In These Coming Days is the debut recording for Hauras on the Helen Scarsdale Agency, and Ryan posits these songs concerning themselves with the psychology of a society at the end of civilization. Prescient for sure, as all of the music here was recorded well before the plague struck the globe. Ryan agitates this gilded decay further with...