In 2015, Jim Haynes accepted a residency at MoKS in the village of Mooste, Estonia to collaborate and contribute to Simon Whetham's Active Crossover series. For this particular incarnation of Active Crossover, well over a dozen international artists were invited to this region of Estonia to collect field recordings and engage in a cross-pollination of ideas, strategies, and concepts that spawned from those recordings. The refuse from Soviet-era industrial farming complexes, the droned blur of aeolian harps, massive oil tanks, and the torrent of noise from the Arctic wind ripping through an empty water tower -- these were some of the sites that this chapter of Active Crossover archived, with each participant encouraged to trawl through the archives in use of composition, performance, installation, etc.
Throttle and Calibration is the first in a series of albums that find Haynes digging through the Active Crossover archive and grotesquely exaggerating the details into exploded compositions of volatile dynamics, nerve-exposed dissonance, caustic shortwave signal abuse, and a considerable amount of scarred metal. Marked as one of the more discordant works to date in Haynes' career, Throttle and Calibration finds company near the atonal compositions from Hermann Nitsch and the sour, industrial collages that pock the Nurse With Wound catalogue. Previously released digitally on Crónica, Throttle & Calibration is fleshed out with an additional 20 minutes of material.