REQ: Moment Freak Foley, an Ari Liloia moment

Ari Liloia is a musician and technologist whose work explores the growth and movement of dense colonies exhibiting irregular repetition—“think barnacles, coral, knitted fabrics, puzzles, etc,” he tells us. Liloia’s musical practice congealed slowly like fungus on the surface of his long-standing field recording hobby. “Some of the spores released landed on fallen trees and bloomed into solo material,” like his debut album ‘ghost town’ from 2021. Others were breathed in, puppeting him “ophiocordyceps-style,” he claims, into collaborations with kindred spirits galen tipton, Dustin Wong, and Thotcrime, and Orange Milk Records.

‘Freak Foley’ emerges from the same love of found sound and field work, but through a distorted lens. The source is wild but the result is wild (in a different way)—these sounds were harvested from nature but expertly refined into exciting music. The work has been done for you, and lovingly. The drums, melodies, and basses are easy enough to cultivate in plentiful musical environments, if you can handle a little disruption. “I like things that are asymmetric, brittle, gritty, noisy, uncomfortably close,” Ari explains. “There are lots of outdoor recordings but it’s no pastoral fantasy.”