Since 2011, cassette label Furious Hooves have released an annual split single to celebrate Halloween and October. Each release brings together multiple artists and hands over complete creative control, allowing them to work together or separately, to design artwork and to riff on the core themes in whatever direction they see fit.
In celebration of the project’s ten year anniversary, Furious Hooves are releasing Furhoof Halloween Split Series: 2011-2021, a limited edition package which collects all eleven Halloween Split Series releases in a double cassette set. Some entries (Iike the songs by mumbledust and the impressively named Spooky Booty & The Tombstone Goofs) capture the kitschy, spooky fun of costumes and free candy brittle, while others turn altogether darker. That something just not-quite-right that walks the streets once the trick-or-treaters are warm and safe in their beds. Check out the likes of Temazcal or Man Eating Sloth if that’s more your thing.
The set also includes this year’s release, which pairs Richmond, VA‘s Jeff Haley and fellow Virginian Kevin Knight. Haley’s song, the ambiguously titled ‘Three Sisters,’ is a jangly if slightly sedate indie pop song on the surface, but there’s something uncanny about the whole thing. Something shifting just out of view, as though there is more to the scene than you can know.
Knight’s ‘Decompose’ is darker still, an ominous late-night descent into streets abandoned to spoil and decay, what Furious Hooves evocatively describe as “a dark journey through a post-apocalyptic forest thick with spore clouds, where the trees have been replaced by the fruiting bodies of a gigantic sentient mycelium.”
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[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=2147611666 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=4217799135]
Furhoof Halloween Split Series: 2011-2021 releases this Halloween, in a double cassette (with “Radioactive Pumpkin” and “Purple Potion” tapes) and zine package. Preorder it now from the Furious Hooves Bandcamp page.
