The Hacker Farm

A collective of rural West Country mavericks operating out of converted barns, using watering cans as monitor speakers, petrol tanks as low frequency oscillators, dabbling with bucolic sorcery, psychogeography, that sort of thing... They have a new album LHF out at the moment.

Anyone picked up on these? Thoughts?

Yeah, I'd be interested to know more. I've seen Reynolds repping this, and they had a profile in the Wire (that's been sitting on my bookshelf for a couple of months I've been meaning to read!). I've only just listened to some of their stuff here and there on the web. Definitely seems interesting though.

This album is great. Jonny Mugwump's Exotic Pylon label has finally found it's feet with this and their recent Afropop album by Frisk Frugt. I don't know anything about Hacker Farm apart the fact that they've got something to do with Kemper Norton, who is someone else who I've been digging recently.

Someone tried to sell this album to me as having been made by a pair of farmers who had gone a bit mad and started converting agricultural equipment into audio gear rather than by techno producers renting a studio in a barn. It's a tantalising narrative if quite clearly untrue.

Petridish calls them 'a kind of anti-Mumford and Sons' which is enough to get me interested.

Only listened to the album with half an ear so far, but it sounded good. It's called UHF btw, like the radio band (reckon they should have called it UHT myself). Love the whole backstory as told in the Wire and love the way they're reclaiming the countryside as a place where people create by bodging and bastardising and turning all this old useless shite here into this really fucking weird other shite over there, not by weaving artisan trugs and selling jumpers woven out of goat pubes for two hundred quid each. Album cover reminds me of Cabaret Voltaire's vision of a society under constant surveillance, but it's not some sleazy plaza in London or Berlin or wherever, it's some shitty old wreck dumped in the corner of a meadow being picked up by the farm's cctv. Probably a dead badger in there too.

Playing down here middle of next month, but I haven't yet got around to checking them out. Though from that Wire piece I can heartily recommend also-featured artist Kemper Norton.

Lovin' their logo:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bpuolOTpuDg/UMHDHwJxJqI/AAAAAAAAD1o/IyzBwH35ezI/s400/Screen+shot+2012-12-07+at+10.21.15.png

LHF

UHF - of course, I'm getting mixed up with something else.

the Wire article is where I heard about them too. It's well worth a read.

lhf album was good too :)

yeah it was, not relly the same thing though... maybe?

i am listening to this on headphones now - it sounds great. as always with music that's made in unusual ways i always feel a bit frustrated that i don't know enough about the working methods. Like, there'll be a sound that could well be the inside of an oil tank, or it could just be a neat effect made digitally. I have no idea. Still, it's definitely got that element of terror that comes apiece with thoughts of the countryside - running through a field at night scared out of your wits, scrambling under wire fences, tripping around in the dark. I don't think I've really heard much electronic music with this kind of social affront since early Aphex Twin.

Incidentally, it would be nice if the LHF album placed EOY, but it won't will it?

WEll isn't this something - whole album on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaW76zS4NS0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kpYrl5UQHU

^ important to watch the interview on youtube imo

<3 atari punk bucket

great vid Nick.

pretty amazing so far, just started listening