Vice Cooler beyond Hawnay Troof: bands, production and video

Alongside Hawnay Troof he has played in bands, drummed for other groups, guested on records, produced and co-written for a range of musicians, and directed music videos. Taken together, that work places him at a busy crossroads of the independent and experimental music worlds.

Bands and drumming

Cooler first appeared as a live performer in 1998 with the experimental punk band XBXRX, the project that ran in parallel with Hawnay Troof for much of the 2000s. Beyond his own groups he has worked as a drummer for others, including the band KIT, and has sat in as a guest drummer for the electronic pop duo Chicks on Speed and for the long-running British post-punk group The Raincoats. That range, from noisy American punk to pioneering British art-punk, says a lot about the company he keeps.

Guests on the Hawnay Troof records

Although Hawnay Troof was a solo project, its albums drew in a rotating cast of collaborators from the wider underground. Contributors named across the catalogue have included Jenny Hoyston, Kori Gardner of Mates of State, Drew Daniel of Matmos and the Soft Pink Truth, Allison Wolfe of Bratmobile, the musician Barr, John Dieterich and Greg Saunier of Deerhoof, and members of the group Stereo Total. Their presence reflects the scene the project grew out of, a network of independent artists who regularly turned up on one another’s records. The releases themselves are listed on the discography page.

Remixes for other artists

Cooler also worked in the other direction, remixing tracks for a long list of independent and experimental acts. Publicly documented remixes under the Hawnay Troof name have been made for the artists below, among others.

• High Places
• No Age
• Yacht
• Jaguar Love
• The Ssion
• Joanna Newsom
• Barr
• Telepathe
• Simo Soo

Several of these remixes circulated as free downloads or on split and compilation releases in the manner typical of the late-2000s underground, and they overlap with the self-released remix work noted on the discography page.

Producing and co-writing

As Hawnay Troof wound down around 2012, Cooler moved increasingly into production, songwriting and mixing for other artists, the work that has occupied much of his time since. He has collaborated in the studio with the electroclash artist Peaches across a number of projects, with the electronic band Ladytron, and with artists including Louisahhh and Ah Mer Ah Su. His credits also extend to work involving figures as established as Kim Gordon and J Mascis. This second act, behind the desk rather than in front of the microphone, has arguably given him a wider reach than Hawnay Troof ever had.

Directing music videos

Cooler is also a music video director, and here too the list of collaborators is long and varied. He has directed videos for independent and experimental acts including Deerhoof, Male Bonding, Hollerado, Abe Vigoda, Cerebral Ballzy and La Luz, as well as for Peaches, for his own projects XBXRX and Hawnay Troof, and for Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth. The through-line is the same underground sensibility that runs through his music: playful, low-budget by design, and made among friends and peers.

A place in the scene

The regard runs both ways. Cooler has been cited as an inspiration by other artists working in adventurous independent music, among them the duo High Places and the punk figurehead Henry Rollins. For a musician whose own project began as an improvised joke, that standing among peers is a fair measure of a career built on saying yes to collaboration.

Following the thread

Readers new to this world can start with the biography for the personal story, or with the music for the sound of the Hawnay Troof records. This page names other artists only to describe genuine, documented working relationships; it does not speak for any of them, and it reproduces none of their work.