The Haters - Førti (2019)

May 1, 1979 – G.X. Jupitter-Larsen introduced The Haters by way of a performance called “Alluring” at a small gallery in New York City, where Jupitter-Larsen lived at the time. In that performance, “Jupitter-Larsen smashed up several video cassettes by hitting them repeatedly with a video camera. The fractured videos still radiated images. Not by television, but by entropy.” Forty years later, The Haters remains active—the recurring emanation of Jupitter-Larsen’s polymathic mind. The Haters is not merely musical; the project embodies performative, sonic, and conceptual elements in equal measures, with the audience often absent or inconsequential (though occasionally audience participation is integral to the performance). The ever-encroaching specter of entropy permeates The Haters. Systems of thought and measurement are distorted; order and structure give way to destruction and erosion.

It is not only the longevity of The Haters that is notable. The project has acted as a nucleus on both microcosmic and macrocosmic scales. For almost three decades, Jupitter-Larsen’s nomadic movements led him to briefly anchor the project in many different locations, including New York, Vancouver, San Francisco, the South of France, Denver, and, for the last 13 years or so, Los Angeles, catalyzing the accretion of art and noise scenes around him. Jupitter-Larsen’s constant movement made it impossible to establish a singular home or group of collaborators, and through the years he has enlisted dozens of confederates for his many performances and recordings.

To celebrate the 40 years of The Haters’ entropic transmissions, G.X. Jupitter-Larsen extracted and refined previously unused sound pieces drawing from some of his most significant source material. Each side of this double 10” release (the 10” vinyl record is Jupitter-Larsen’s preferred musical format) features a previously unreleased recording reflecting each decade of The Haters: the slow erosion of a calculator against sandpaper (1989); the amplified sounds of Jupitter-Larsen’s Untitled Title Belt (1999); the use of a balance scale as a sound source (2009); and an entirely new recording using an instrument called the Totimorphous Ubiety Guide recently created by Jupitter-Larsen.

Accompanying each copy of “Forti” is a flexi, called “AMK Plays Forti,” featuring two tracks by AMK—one of the most stalwart Haters collaborators—sourced from the montaged anti-records he created using the complete collection of test presses for the “Forti” release. As is his custom, AMK destroyed and refabricated the records using flexis and other musical and non-musical items, then played and rendered entirely new sounds from them.