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November 22 show!

We will produce a semi-centennial show on November 22nd to mark two High Mayhem stalwarts turning 50 years old.

The show will feature solo sets by Alex Neville and Carlos Santistevan, followed by The Folding Space Conduction Ensemble. More details soon.

WATIV XX: Twenty Years of Silence

High Mayhem is pleased to announce the release of WATIV XX: Twenty Years of Silence on cassette and digital download. The album is available here.

WATIV XX: Twenty Years of Silence is a sonic confrontation with memory and war, a 20-year audio reflection by William A. Thompson IV, a former U.S. Army counterintelligence agent deployed to Iraq in 2005.

Side A, composed in 2025, explores how memory lingers not as a narrative but as signal, texture, and ghost. These new compositions are built from transcribed speech, including fragments of Southern preacher sermons and poems by Robert Frost and Walt Whitman that mourn or memorialize fallen soldiers. These texts are never directly spoken; instead, they are algorithmically transformed into music using symbolic and spectral transcription methods, including command-line tools like WAON. The resulting works are performed on the Infastain Piano, an augmented acoustic instrument designed by the artist using tactile transducers mounted to the soundboard.

Side B presents a remastered archival edition of Baghdad Music Journal, the original wartime album recorded on deployment. Built from field recordings, captured Iraqi radio, and early speech-to-music experiments, it was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and profiled in Leonardo Music Journal. The work has since been cited in Sound Targets by Jonathan Pieslak (Indiana University Press), a major study of soldiers and music in the Iraq War.
Together, the two sides form a sonic palimpsest, a magnetic tape conversation across decades and states of mind, from battlefield immediacy to long-distance aftermath. 

New Out of Context LP – Live at High Mayhem Festival 2006

High Mayehm is releasing a series of LP’s to highlight the legacy of JA Dino Deane. The first Out of Context LP is from the fantastic live performance of Out of Context at the High Mayhem Festival 2006. This Album is available for order here and was formally released at The Outpost Performance Space in Albuquerque NM on April 27 in an tribute to JA Deane

We are also looking to relaunch our On(e) Day “On One Day” webcast series of broadcasting the recording of an album in 1 day. Stay tuned for update.

IN DEFENSE OF MEMORY– Laura Ortman, Marshall Trammell, Carlos Santistevan is working with SITE Santa Fe for a large scale “tuning” of the San Miguel Chapel to help address generational trauma and relics still present in are times. Information and Previous work on this can be found here.

iNK oN pAPER is back and open to performance opportunities.

ALBUMS AVAILABLE AT highmayhem.bandcamp.org

High Mayhem Emerging Arts is proud to release Flashes Before Our Mind by Thollem

All album proceeds will be donated to the Pueblo Relief Fund

This album is part of the On(e) Day webcast and album series curated by High Mayhem Emerging Arts, based in Santa Fe, NM. Creative artists are brought into our live room recording studio and have 1 day to record an album. The session is webcast and the resulting album is then released. Authentic performances. Insights into Creativity.

 

For this On(e) Day session Thollem played 1 long set of solo improvisations and explorations and edited the music for the gems- Video of the session can be found here:

 
Here are some words about the album from the artist:

 

I recorded this music entirely with the new Korg Wavestate which I had just acquired. The album is a sonic adventure full of surprises. I loved recording this album. And it was a blast recording in Carlos’ beautiful studio.
 
When I was editing the final mixes when George Floyd was murdered. I decided to weave 526 seconds of silence into the editing of the album. Each pause is in prime numbers starting from 2 seconds leading up to 43 and back down to 2. This has been a powerful meditation for me and I feel that this is a powerful work of art. That said, this country desperately needs fundamental change to heal from hundreds of years of systemic racism and genocide, far beyond symbolic and artistic expression.

 

The cover art is a photograph by ACVilla somewhere between Española and Albuquerque.

Love and solidarity, Tholl

Please consider supporting the longevity of High Mayhem and On(e) Day by donating to us. Your donation is used to support the artists and pay for the equipment that makes this possible.

For On(e) Day albums and other releases, please check out our ONLINE STORE!  Some of the old out of print releases, some available for the first time!

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Follow our audio on http://soundcloud.com/highmayhem

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<p>“… as if drum ‘n’ bass took a detour through an electro-acoustic free-punk Jucifer and had its downbeats addled or partly removed.”-Signal to Noise Review</p>
<p>The result is a duo that is drags rhythm through the mud in unimaginably glorious ways.</p>