Laughter Has Long Legs is the one-man, homemade musical project of Mike Rings. After exercising his spastic talents in several Los Angeles bands—including Ebola Music artists The Weddings Off, The Domestication of Animals, and Ego Plum’s Ebola Music Orchestra—Rings relocated to Bloomington, Indiana in order to pursue a PhD in philosophy at Indiana University. Moving into a forlorn wood-paneled apartment at the edge of town, surrounded by the sounds of cicada-choked woods and grumbling freight trains, he started to make music that responded to this semi-rural, gently noisy isolation. What resulted is more bothered than bucolic, more paranoid than pastoral. This is not the folksy strumming of a solo man in the woods. Rings’ multi-tracked vocals unfurl alien melismas over a thick and broken clutter of sound: frenetic percussion, jarring samples, delirious loops, landslides of shuddering white noise. This is maximalist music, a dense and dizzying combination of musique concrète, postpunk prog, and art-damaged chamber pop that at times verges on the operatic. It is the sound of a musician submerged in a deep sonic stew of his own devising, using his own voice as a ladder to climb out of it before he goes under for good. The music of Laughter Has Long Legs is now available on a pair of 3 song EP’s: Ilyatic Summer Blues parts I and II. Rings brings his mad scrabble of sound to songs about reinventing the self in various animal forms, sex as a form of flight, leaving places, arriving places, and death that hovers in nearby forests and faraway market squares.