ERIC HAUSMANN: PRESS

Hausmann is one of DIY recording's premier guitarists and this is a brilliant display of his work. Big Guitars is just that ? the guitars sound BIG. They are often multi-tracked, doubling and harmonizing. Hausmann's dirty chord riffs are veritable monsters of crunching intensity. Conversely, Hausmann is able to attain a whispering shimmer at other times with smooth, gliding volume shifts. This will appeal to those who just love the endless variety possible on guitar, and also to those who just enjoy damn good music. Highly recommended.

A solo effort from the instigator of Spilling Audio, this mostly guitar-driven album points out one of the main advantages of small labels vs. traditional major labels -- namely, you can get away with being amazingly eccentric without any problem. I don't think a major label would let Hausmann wander all over the stylistic map the way he does here; they also wouldn't let him release 90 minutes of material on one album, either. But hah, their loss is our gain -- there's much good stuff to be found here, from the soaring guitars of "Talk To Me, Baby" and the inventive percussion of "Khatan Hill" to the eerie throb of "Untitled" (sounding almost like an outtake from Controlled Bleeding's GOLGOTHA) and the spooky, reverbed keyboards in "Interlude # 2." The big influences here appear to be jazz and orchestral music, but Hausmann assembles it all together here in a new and interesting way. And the other 11 songs are every bit as idiosyncrastic, interesting, and well-crafted as the ones mentioned above. For the adventurous when they tire of the screaming walls of noisefuzz... and it's all instrumental, too.

Don't let the title fool you into thinking of arena rock dinosaurs-this stuff is eerier, more tribal, more convoluted than that by far. Eric, with the occasional help from Hank Jansen, wends his way through a dozen+ instrumentals here, perplexing and tantalizing, ending up with the classy fade of 'Aiming At Darkness'.