These Things Happen Vol. 1 begins with Formica being deprived of its ordinary purpose. The synthetic laminate associated with counters, tables and wipe-clean domestic surfaces becomes material for impact, friction and collapse. “Truncated Formica (Smash Version)” places repeated blows inside a mass of feedback and low mechanical movement. The object is no longer useful as a surface. It becomes audible only while being damaged.
Released by John Wiese’s Helicopter label in 2012, These Things Happen Vol. 1 gathers fourteen pieces originally created for seven-inch records, including material that had become extremely scarce or remained effectively unheard. The recordings were newly transferred and remastered from the original DAT tapes, giving a clear view of the Haters’ work during a period when GX Jupitter-Larsen repeatedly used the vinyl single as both sound carrier and conceptual object.
The seven-inch format suits the Haters because it is physically restrictive. A side lasts only a few minutes, the groove occupies a small circular area, and the listener must repeatedly handle the object. Jupitter-Larsen does not treat those limitations as problems to overcome. Duration, surface, rotation, groove spacing and playback failure become part of the composition.
“Truncated Formica” exists in two versions. The “Smash Version” emphasizes impact and destruction, with blows interrupting feedback that seems to recoil after each strike. The “Clici-Clic Version” feels more mechanical, building from repeated contact, deeper roaring sound and the suggestion of smaller components snapping or shifting inside a larger object. One version destroys through blunt force; the other listens to destruction as a system of tiny events.
This distinction is important. The Haters’ music is often summarized as amplified destruction, but the project is not simply interested in breaking things loudly. Jupitter-Larsen studies what happens during deterioration. An object has one acoustic identity while intact, another while being damaged and another after it has become debris. The process creates a sequence of temporary forms.
“Rubbish Often Tears” and “Reflections Off Trash” push that process into accumulated waste. Rubbish is not one substance. It is a social category imposed upon unrelated materials after their original uses have ended. Plastic, paper, metal and broken equipment become unified only because someone has decided to discard them. The Haters reverses that decision by treating trash as a field of possible actions.
Tearing, scraping, dragging and collision reveal differences hidden by the word rubbish. A sheet splits differently from a container. A hollow object resonates while a flat one produces friction. The sound does not restore these things to usefulness. It grants them another period of activity while they continue falling apart.
The compilation’s central selections from Drops Ascending originated on a double seven-inch issued by Vinyl Communications in 1995. The complete work drew from explosions, flamethrowers, car-accident recordings, skipping compact discs, scratched records and a “trashcape” constructed from things collapsing. Volume 1 includes the first two parts, presenting destruction as an impossible upward movement.
A dropped object obeys gravity, but “Drops Ascending” treats falling as something capable of being reorganized. Recording reverses ordinary physical time. An impact can be replayed, edited, layered or made to precede its cause. The event still sounds destructive, yet its direction is no longer certain. Falling becomes a pattern rather than a final destination.
The pieces are dense but not formless. Low rumbles hold together sharper collisions, while bursts of abrasive sound enter and disappear before they can become a permanent wall. Skipping discs and damaged vinyl introduce repetition that is both mechanical and accidental. A groove repeats because playback has failed, but the failure immediately creates rhythm.
This is one of the Haters’ fundamental discoveries: an apparatus can function perfectly while producing the appearance of malfunction, and it can malfunction while generating an unexpectedly coherent result. The project does not divide useful operation from defect as cleanly as ordinary engineering would. Damage is another way a system behaves.
“Nirgends 2” and “A Furthered Pause 2” move the collection toward absence. Nirgends means nowhere, but the recording occupies a definite physical space in speakers and air. A pause should interrupt action, yet a “furthered” pause becomes an action through extension. Jupitter-Larsen repeatedly turns negative conditions—nowhere, silence, emptiness, interruption—into measurable material.
The Haters’ performances make this logic visible. Jupitter-Larsen and changing participants have used paper, fabric, masks, amplified tools, spinning devices and heaps of debris to create situations in which the action cannot be separated from its residue. The performer does not stand before an instrument and demonstrate mastery. Bodies, equipment and material enter the same unstable process.
These Things Happen preserves sound from that practice without pretending a recording can contain the entire action. The listener hears impact and erosion but does not necessarily see the object, physical effort or resulting mess. That missing information is productive. A sound suggests matter without identifying it completely, making every scrape both specific and abstract.
“Nikumu Ni” and “Nikumu San” are shorter, concentrated constructions. Their Japanese numbering marks them as second and third parts, fragments belonging to a larger cycle rather than independent statements. Repeated abrasion and shifting pressure create the sensation of material being worked continuously from different positions.
“Smear” treats deformation as lateral movement. To smear something is not necessarily to destroy it completely; it is to spread substance across a surface until its original boundaries disappear. The Haters’ sound behaves similarly. Impact becomes resonance, resonance enters distortion, and distortion spreads until source and recording process can no longer be separated.
“Disconnected Number” and “Unlisted Number” turn communication failure into another form of absence. A disconnected telephone number once pointed toward a person or place but no longer completes the circuit. An unlisted number may still function while remaining inaccessible to public search. One connection has been severed; the other has been deliberately concealed.
Placed beside works created from physical damage, these titles suggest that disappearance can occur administratively as well as materially. Something does not have to be smashed in order to become unreachable. It may simply be removed from the available system of reference.
The collection closes with “Paper Tears/Time Doesn’t Move,” a twenty-seven-second piece originating from the Haters’ split seven-inch with Little Fyodor. The original record turned vinyl geometry into a joke about duration. Its grooves were spaced unusually far apart and became progressively wider, causing both sides together to end in less time than the listener needed to settle down after placing the needle.
The track is almost over before it can be recognized as a composition. Paper tears, but time does not move—or moves so abruptly that awareness cannot keep pace. The seven-inch becomes a machine for producing anticlimax. Instead of filling the format’s available duration, the Haters wastes space deliberately, allowing the physical groove to carry the argument.
Transferred to CD, that visual and mechanical joke cannot operate in the same way. The laser does not reveal widening vinyl grooves. Yet the absurd brevity remains, appearing after nearly an hour of accumulated abrasion like a trapdoor opening beneath the compilation.
The remastering does not clean these recordings into conventional fidelity. It clarifies the grain of impact, the depth of rumble and the separation between simultaneous layers. Dirt remains information. A damaged source made pristine would contradict the work, but a careful transfer allows the damage itself to be heard more precisely.
These Things Happen Vol. 1 succeeds because it does more than collect rare singles. It reveals how consistently the Haters used the seven-inch record as a laboratory for entropy. Formica shatters, rubbish tears, objects fall, pauses expand, numbers disconnect, paper splits and time refuses to behave. The title dismisses catastrophe with the language of ordinary inevitability: these things happen.
For the Haters, however, happening is never ordinary. Every collapse has texture, every failure produces structure, and every ruined object enters another temporary state before disappearing. The compilation ends, but nothing has been restored. The debris remains where it fell, still capable of making sound if someone chooses to disturb it again.
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