Hawnay Troof and Vice Cooler: a biography
Who Hawnay Troof is: the Vice Cooler story
Hawnay Troof was the solo project of Vice Cooler, an American musician and music video director who has been active since the late 1990s.
The name covered roughly a decade of restless, self-recorded electronic pop, from 2001 until around 2012, after which its creator turned increasingly to production and collaboration behind other artists.
From Mobile to the West Coast
Vice Cooler grew up in Mobile, Alabama, and began performing live in 1998 as part of the abrasive experimental punk band XBXRX. That group established the template that would follow him everywhere: fast, physical, do-it-yourself music made with whatever was to hand and played wherever a set could be squeezed in. XBXRX toured widely on the American underground circuit, and it was against that backdrop, rather than any conventional industry route, that a second and very different project took shape.
Where XBXRX was a band, Hawnay Troof would be a solo undertaking, and where XBXRX was guitars and drums, Hawnay Troof would be built from software, drum machines and voice. In time Cooler relocated from Alabama to Oakland, California, and it was there that the project settled into its most productive years.
How Hawnay Troof began
By most accounts, including the artist’s own retellings, Hawnay Troof started almost as a prank. Unable to afford entry to a show, Cooler and a friend talked their way in by claiming to be one of the acts on the bill, then had to make good on the claim. Songs were reportedly written that same day using a pirated copy of the FruityLoops music software, and the pair played a short, chaotic set near the venue’s vending machines before the headline act. The improvised, anything-goes spirit of that first performance stuck, and the name did too.
Going solo and signing to Retard Disco
As a solo concern, Hawnay Troof found a natural home on Retard Disco, the independent label that released the 2003 debut. Later work also appeared through Southern Records. Across four studio albums the project moved from lo-fi beginnings toward denser, more ambitious productions, but it never lost the sense that the records were made at home, by one person, for the love of it. A fuller account of the releases is on the discography page, and a note on the sound itself is under the music.
The touring years
For a home-recorded project, Hawnay Troof travelled a remarkable distance. Cooler took the music far beyond the United States, with dates reported across Iceland, Australia, New Zealand, Egypt, China and Europe, and shared stages with a range of well-regarded independent acts. The live incarnation of the project leaned into the same unpredictability as its origin story, and the touring is covered in more detail on the live and touring page.
After the project
Hawnay Troof wound down as an active recording name around 2012. Rather than stopping, its creator moved into a role that suited a lifelong studio obsessive: writing, producing and mixing for other artists. In the years since, Vice Cooler has worked with a wide circle of musicians and directed music videos for a number of well-known independent acts, a body of work set out on the collaborations page. Taken together, Hawnay Troof reads less like a finished chapter than like one intense phase in a long, still-unfolding musical life.