the ugly hug

There are elements within our environment that operate through layers of chaos. But it needs to be clear that chaos isn’t innately ugly, and as a matter of fact, Favorite Haunts continues to prove with each release that chaos can be an inherent source of comfort to an individual that finds themselves in the middle of it all. The way we look at a colony of ants from our height appears chaotic, yet functions as a collaborative and productive society that takes care of all. Chaos can be the inner workings of a kitchen, preparing the most lip-smacking food you’ve ever had, made at the hands of a sweaty, rag-tag team of chefs and line cooks working between smoke breaks. Chaos is the collection of noises, the rustling of brush, a dealer’s choice of bird species and the wings of a bee making acquaintance with your ear that orchestrates your favorite natural sceneries. But it’s in this chaos, when you take the time, where you can define the many happy accidents that create something that has never been experienced quite like this before.

Favorite Haunts is the recording project of LA-based artist Alex Muñoz, who has been releasing art under the name since his initial recordings back in 2020. With an extensive collection of albums, including some from the Favorite Haunts Sewing Circle (a live group configuration of LA creatives), Muñoz makes an effort to build a unique life within each collection of sounds that he discovers, honoring each happy accident as if they happen for a reason. Favorite Haunts recently released their latest album titled Floral Pedal, finding Muñoz sharing his most reflective and collaborative piece of work to date. After finding a floral designed loop pedal, “covered in a thin layer of dust and weighing as much as a brick”, the way in which this pedal opened up new layers of understanding – what are the stories from which these sounds may have been coming from – became strikingly influential to Muñoz throughout the process.

Floral Pedal is a beautiful collection of recordings, building little intrinsic settings from found samples and intuitively formed instrumentation. It’s also a strikingly intense album, not in any kind of sonic display, but rather from the strength of presence, following an individual’s ever shifting connection to the environment that surrounds them. It’s a meeting of ghosts, the old and new relationships in our lives, of indescribable beauty and momentary memorial lapses. Even the thin layer of dust becomes a lens of discovery into a different place – who we are and who we may be if the bigger picture was as easy to shift as the dust that we hold – that even our existence itself is a happy accident worth celebrating. 

We recently got to talk to Alex Muñoz about Floral Pedal, discussing how the record came to be, finding inspiration in whatever is around you and embracing the magic that is right in front of us. 

Tell me about this floral loop pedal. Where did you find it, what were your first experiences with it and how did it come to shape this record?

For a while I had been wanting to get a loop pedal to try improvising live after seeing Dustin Wong play a couple shows around LA, and was inspired by his way of looping guitar live. I had been wanting to change up my live set from strictly samplers to incorporate more guitars since some of the music I’ve been making/releasing lately is getting more guitar based than my previous ambient/sample based stuff. This past December, a buddy of mine from Colorado was selling some pedals on his instagram stories and I saw he was selling the Line 6 DL4 for a good price, so I decided to buy it! The DL4 was the loop pedal I had my eye on the most, since I’d seen some of my musical heroes using it here and there; Lightning Bolt, Nick Reinhart, Battles, etc.

It’s such a unique piece of gear with so many interesting features, like it’s supposed to mainly be a delay pedal, but people use it as strictly a looper mostly. It has a function that speeds up the loop or slows it down, depending on the mode you record it on, and combining loops at different speeds can create an amazing array of shimmery, melty, twinkle-y sounds! It also has a reverse function (with 2 different speeds as well), and has a button to play the loops manually, kinda like a sampler! These are things I discovered while messing around with it and watching YouTube videos to learn more, haha.

The very first thing I recorded with the pedal was the track “thru the woods”. It started as just another doodle/test, and the loop sounded cool to me, so I recorded it and kinda kept adding layers to it as the track progressed. There are about 3 or 4 different guitar riffs in that one track, that are just layered on top of each other until it sounded full and nice to me. I just used the voice memo app on my phone propped up to my amp to record it (along with all the main loops on the album). Those cool little functions really helped shape the sound of the album, they’re all over the record.

I was very intrigued by the singular word you used in parentheses when describing this pedal – the word magic. What parts of these recordings would you say came from magic? How do you interpret that word in your relationship to creativity? 

I believe music is magic, like, it comes from the weirdest, most colorful parts of the human brain and brings people so much comfort and connection. It’s a very spiritual/holy thing to me. I’m not a trained musician by any means, everything i’ve learned is by ear or picking up from friends and other musicians along the way, I know very little music theory and cannot read music. So when I’m working on a track or improvising, and I play something by accident that ends up sounding cool, it almost always piques my interest, so I run with it and use it. To me that is magic, that accidental note or sound wanted to exist and found a way to use me as a vessel to escape into the world. I’m here for it and love that way of interacting with music and art as a whole. I’m super into “happy accidents”. Happy accidents are what this album is pretty much made of! I also believe that layer of “dust (magic)” were little particles from another place I had never been to (Colorado), that might have found their way into the DNA of the music, physically and spiritually. It was covered in adventure and the essence of Colorado!

That’s so interesting! What parts of these songs felt like your own adventure? Living vicariously through this dust, did this project influence your personal ideas of presence and environment? 

It’s funny you say my own adventure, because while recording the album, I started to slowly imagine this surreal and psychedelic adventure using the song titles, possible track order, and sounds of each track. The “floral pedal” is kinda this loose concept in the story, but I was thinking of it as a colorful little glowing magic box that emits nice music, that our main character finds on the ground near the entrance to the woods while riding their bike. They decided to put in their backpack, thus being the catalyst for the whole adventure. So the story kinda sprawls out from there and forms a loose narrative. I’m inspired by a lot of folklore and also adventure stories, like The Odyssey by Homer, and how the classic story structure and tropes find their way into modern storytelling. Like for example, with the movies “O Brother, Where Art Thou” & “The Warriors”, etc. I wanted to create my own fairytale adventure type story to dive into, and let my imagination run wild while recording. I actually haven’t really told any of this made up lore to anyone other than to a couple close friends, and now y’all here! I hope to maybe make a little zine or something later, to go deep and explain what every track means! That’ll be fun I think. It would all be too much to explain here, so all I will say is, it’ll be a surreal fantasy adventure and the song titles are basically the theme of each “scene” from the story. Sorry if that was kind of a detour from your question a little bit, haha

Were there any ways in which you approached this project differently than in the past? Did you want to focus on any new techniques or challenge yourself where you were already comfortable? 

Yeah absolutely, I approached this project in almost an entirely different way than other projects, except maybe my previous album “Music from Big Green” which was recorded on my phone and mixed/layered via SP404. I started recording these loops on my voice memo app in January, just as a way to document the ideas, and I was only really planning on maybe just making a little EP out of it and that’s it. Then I just kept recording more and more of them, and having fun with adding samples and other stuff. It just kind of blossomed into this garden of accidents and colorful little pocket symphonies. After having a large collection of recordings on my phone, I started feeling like maybe I can add more to these recordings. I reached out to my friend Johnny (The Fruit Trees) who I have collaborated with in the past and is also a member of my group Favorite Haunt’s Sewing Circle, because he had offered after hearing some of the recordings, to maybe overdub some saxophone or clarinet. I liked that idea and recorded a new track for him to play over which became the track “Mystery Spot/Enchanted”. It kinda grew from there and we ended up working on adding more elements to the entire album together. I like working with him because I think we are both sometimes reading each other’s minds, and know exactly what to do next. We’ve shared creative epiphanies more than words at times when working together, which is cool and special to me. I recruited more awesome friends (Fletcher Barton, RJ Wilks, Stress Actual) to overdub various instruments to more tracks, and it really started to feel like it was becoming this living breathing organism of an album.

Around the time of recording I was also listening to Pet Sounds a lot, so you can probably tell where my head was at during this time. Like, “let’s add everything we got to this thing”, and getting excited about it when we listen back to it after recording. I felt like a kid making a fort with my friends or like when people band together to make a huge Rube Goldberg machine in their backyard. This process was still totally new to me at the time, and it presented me with more creative ideas than challenges I’d say. The way I made my music previously was honestly more challenging and sort of limiting at times. I would usually use a lot more samples and some phone recordings still, then put them all into my SP404 sampler and kind of use it as a workstation, slowly layering things on top of each other. That process takes forever but I think it helped me learn how to make something with limited gear (I usually don’t use any DAWS). 

What sort of paths did limiting yourself lead you down? Was it a challenge for you to limit what you used?

Having those limits early on has definitely pushed me to want to branch out and try making music differently. I’d been making my music using that sampler method since about 2019 or so. Since then I’ve interacted with so many different musicians that have inspired me with the ways they write and record their music. It all just looks so fun, and my old method was starting to bore me a bit, because the music I have been wanting to make has been evolving. This project started as just me making lofi beats in my room in 2019, using pretty much only samples, and not really showing them to anybody. Now it’s really expanded, and I’m collaborating with more people, and things have felt a lot more free with how I can express myself and get creative through this project. I think I was feeling pretty stuck around this time last year, with what I wanted to make, how it sounded, and how I wanted to make it. I’m really glad I kept making things regardless of all those feelings, and I’m really grateful for where I’m at creatively and for the folks who have found my music thus far and told me they resonate with it. I think the biggest challenge for me overall was actually letting go and letting the music have a life of its own in the world and other people’s worlds, since this project started as such a private thing for me to occupy my time during the pandemic. You are actually also the first person to ever write about my music, which means a lot to me, and realizing where I am in my music life now really reminds me that I’ve grown a lot since my socially anxious pandemic hermit days.

You offered a long list of names and ideas that you gave gratitude towards for making this record happen. In what ways do you interpret inspiration for these recordings? 

Inspiration is all colors to me. Like, the type of reverb used in my favorite song that week is one color, the meal I ate for breakfast that morning is another color, a movie I saw a couple days prior is another color. It all sort of comes together for me while making something, either consciously or subconsciously. Nothing feels like it goes to waste. This album really felt like I tuned in to what inspires me, recent happenings and from my childhood in particular. Every track really felt like an appreciation of the things that have made me who I am today. The way a sour note on a guitar chord somehow ended up making the loop remind me of the soundtrack to the movie Coraline, or how another loop started giving me the same feelings and imagery as walking through the South Pasadena tunnels (that were covered in vines and surrounded by trees when exposed in certain areas) with my pals as teenagers many years ago, or when my friends and I would wake up early after hanging out late that night, and take an early morning drive into the Angeles National Forest and listen to Bryter Layter by Nick Drake. Just magical moments and media from my life. Stuff like that was coming up a lot and really inspiring during the making of this album. I’m really happy that I got to translate those moments of my life into this music! Also, as for the long list of inspiration and special thanks, I was inspired by the inside CD booklet of Person Pitch by Panda Bear, he includes a very long list of his favorite artists and inspiration for the album. When I saw that, I thought that was awesome. I can’t stand gatekeeping.

You’ve previously mentioned that this is the first release that you actually hope people listen to and hold in their hearts. What kind of life do you hope for this album to have once it’s out of your hands and in the world? Is it easy to let projects go?

Yeah, I didn’t really mean that as in, like, that I didn’t care at all before or anything. It’s just with this album, I made it with the hope of bringing comfort to people, because the process and sounds were also bringing me so much comfort. I just really wanted to share this whole experience. I wanted to make something that I wanted to listen to, and for others to want to listen to as well. Which is actually a first for me, because I think before I was just making stuff because I had ideas that were more like “wouldn’t it be funny or cool if ___” and just making it just to make it. Which was still fun and fulfilling, but lately I’ve just wanted to focus on making things with more intention, to bring people comfort and connection. 

This album was very easy to let go into the world. I can’t wait for it to be out. This album feels like a school project I remember making in the 1st grade, where I had to make a little diorama of a rainforest. I was so proud of it and excited to bring it to class the next day! This feels a lot like that rainforest diorama, in more ways than one.

Every Wednesday, the ugly hug shares a playlist personally curated by an artist/band that we have been enjoying. This week, we are pairing our guest list with our feature of LA- based artist Alex Muñoz of favorite haunts.

About the playlist, Alex shares;

I put this playlist together, like I have a ritual of doing with every project I work on, as a way to stay inspired and focused when im not at home working on the project. This playlist consists of music that I’d been really enjoying at the time of making the album. Some of the music has been in my constant listening rotation for almost a decade. There are a couple tracks in particular that I wanted to mention:

1. Ethio Invention #1 by Andrew Bird

This piece came into my life after a long night of hanging out, driving around los angeles with my friends in maybe 2018(?). We were on our way to our friend’s place to crash for the night, and my friend Nate played this song on the aux, and I was absolutely floored. The combination of being deliriously tired after a long fun day and driving through the hills of Los Feliz in LA, overlooking the city below, clad in flickering lights…was the perfect moment. That moment still continues to inspire my art.

This track basically inspired the whole album. Starting with the pizzicato style plucking of the strings of his violin, a sound that i’m obsessed with, to being able to hear him clicking his loop pedal in the recording. The track eventually gets so dense with loops and effects layered on themselves that it turns into ambience. A perfect piece of music.

2. Miracle by Jurassic Shark

Jshark was a local band from my hometown that had a huge impact on me. They lived more or less down the street from me. They were my first diy show. They are the reason I started making music, recording, and playing shows, etc. They had something really special and unique that set them apart from the surfy so-cal bands at the time. Their songs were beautiful and everytime they played, they filled the room with reverb, energy, colors, and sparks. They also sometimes used to play with stacks of books on their amps, and patterned fabric on their amp faces which was funny and awesome to me. Truly a magical band!

Listen to Alex’s playlist here;

Floral Pedal is out everywhere now!

Written by Shea Roney | Featured Photos Courtesy of Favorite Haunts