Hav Lyfe by Hav Lyfe

The third release on Sonic Router Records is a self-titled ten track LP from the shady producer, Hav Lyfe. Honestly, it feels like the kind of project we started the label to house: a completely individual 32 minutes of roughly spun, improvised tracks that perfectly captures a flurry of Hav’s creativity. 10 tracks long the album is composed out of his trademark raw, textural sketches that sometimes get strung over the top of brooding crunched out rhythms or end up finding an internal rhythm within the distorted loops and folds of sound.

“I don’t have much,” he admits when asked about his production processes. “I work on an old Pentium and record straight to this little mp3 player I’ve got. It ain’t much, but it’s cheap and sounds weird and looks great…”

Whilst his (lack of) equipment might define how the audio sounds, there’s a real honesty and directness present in the material - like on ‘Civivic’ where Hav draws out this time stretched drum loop that feels like it could go on forever, or on ‘Dion2Cool’ and ‘Mond’ where he just bluntly repeats the main phrase stoically, because he can. The Hav Lyfe album is a collection of these kinds of short expressions; a hypnotic headphone record that really manages to draw you in to his way of thinking.

“This music is just for me,” Hav adds in his usual distantly concise manner; “it keeps me sane.”

The Guardian called us: "the kind of label that puts out records that are a little bit danceable, a little bit 'whoa, what’s that noise?' and a bit, 'Argh, my faaaace..'"

Tumblr