Ham Lake Records is a vinyl-first techno label that specializes in idiosyncratic headfuck music for both dancing and melting into the sofa.
I birthed Ham Lake this winter out of a deep passion for experimental music and a longstanding desire to provide a flying buttress to underrepresented sonic manipulators that only recognize boundaries that demand to be broken.
Ham Lake’s first release is by a modular drone technician from the bowels of Brooklyn: User Error. One must unlearn what they think they know about the subtleties of sound to find resolve in User Error’s complex manipulation of texture and his repetition of ruddy tones.
All imagery for this album is sourced from screen captures and photographs documenting a myriad of late-night interactions that I feast upon within Periscope (a live-streaming social video app that allows users to broadcast their lives to the world in real time).
The pictures of these anonymous broadcasters, that I harvest from these ‘scoping’ excursions, are then illustrated in unison to the discordant rhythms found on the record… real-time internet slow-burning the dusky virtual detritus into an immortal choreography between sound and design.
An outsider’s perspective requires great strength. This is the Ham Lake way.