Bal Kaur

January 12, 2021 in Isstillcools**t, Feature

In the Mutableye

The above painting by Bali Kaur is a masterful expression of her on-going and ever-evolving aesthetic. Kaur began her work as a printmaker but over her twenty-some-year career has explored a variety of techniques and media. We here at Mutable are excited to see how her vision and her masterful understanding of space, color, and the dynamics of place continue to change and grow. Overland II is just one of several pieces currently on display at Silson Contemporary, 17 Harlow Oval, Harrogate, HG2 0DS. The gallery is open Fridays 10.30am – 4.00pm, and one weekend a month, 10.30am – 4.00pm, on Saturday and Sunday.

In the Mutableye is a segment that sometimes showcases something interesting that is happening somewhere in the world at this moment, and sometimes showcases some fad or person from the past that we here at Mutable acknowledge is still cool s**t.

Not Available (2 of 2)

January 12, 2021 in Article, Feature

D Howland Abbott

There are several long-standing theories regarding the identities of the Residents. One of the earliest (and most amusing) is that the Residents are in fact the Beatles. This was an appealing notion to listeners in the early 1970s, who were still reeling from the sudden self-destruction of the collaborative effort between those strange, beautiful boys. It didn’t help that the Residents’ first full-length record, Meet the Residents, boasted artwork lifted directly from the Beatles’ album Meet the Beatles, with the faces of John, Paul, George and Ringo having been altered with a marker so that they had crossed eyes, nose rings and devil horns. Some fans held onto this belief for many years, but most eventually abandoned it when they were forced to acknowledge that the Residents’ output simply didn’t sound like it could have possibly been made the same group of people.

Screen Shot 2021-01-26 at 4.33.28 PM.png

Video: Terminator 24

January 12, 2021 in Isstillcools**t, Feature

In the Mutableye

Speakers’ Corner is a place where anyone can get up on a soapbox and preach it, and Terminator 24 has been a fixture there for over four decades. A self-styled “symbolic ironic play striving to dream, explore, question, learn and live compassionately without fear, prejudice, hate and abuse,” the character of Terminator 24 [or T24 as he is sometimes called] came about as the result of one man’s questioning spirit as well as through his genuine efforts to interact with a wide variety of diverse tourists and visitors. I first saw this video probably more than 20 years ago, and Terminator 24’s remarkable brand of Socratic method struck me at the time and it strikes me as remarkable to this day.

The film found below [by David Napier and Paul Dionne] features many of the characters you would have found at Speaker’s Corner in 1994, but it settles on Terminator 24, who is still there today, and if you ever make it to London, you should definitely take the time to visit Hyde Park and visit Speaker’s Corner to learn how this business of learning is done from the master himself. For more on Terminator 24, please feel free to visit his website.

Social interaction, satire, humour, various topics including sex, ethnicity, PC, and cultural hegemony. "A typically untypical day at Speakers Corner, Hyd...

In the Mutableye is a segment that sometimes showcases something interesting that is happening somewhere in the world at this moment, and sometimes showcases some fad or person from the past that we here at Mutable acknowledge is still cool s**t.

The Manifesto of Surrealism

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Andre Breton

So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life—real life, I mean—that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts, for he has agreed to work, at least he has not refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luck!). At this point he feels extremely modest: he knows what women he has had, what silly affairs he has been involved in; he is unimpressed by his wealth or his poverty, in this respect he is still a newborn babe and, as for the approval of his conscience, I confess that he does very nicely without it. If he still retains a certain lucidity, all he can do is turn back toward his childhood which, however his guides and mentors may have botched it, still strikes him as somehow charming. There, the absence of any known restrictions allows him the perspective of several lives lived at once; this illusion becomes firmly rooted within him; now he is only interested in the fleeting, the extreme facility of everything. Children set off each day without a worry in the world. Everything is near at hand, the worst material conditions are fine. The woods are white or black, one will never sleep.

Avocado Forcefield

January 12, 2021 in Podcast, Mutablesoundofthemonth, Feature

Mutable Sound of the Month

We here at Mutable are a little bit in love with this track and the accompanying album. It’s a bit of off-kilter improvised synth-y and drum-driven beauty from the duo Ruben + Monte Cristo. If you’re into what you hear, you can check out the whole album here. But for now, check out the bit of awesomeness below!

Avocado Forcefield by Ruben and Monte Cristo, released 13 February 2007

Mutable is pleased to present a unique musical experience every month or so by ourselves or someone we’ve been introduced to. These are from the reel-to-reels and tascams of the garages and basements of the world. Send tracks to mail@mutablesound.com along with credits and a brief description.

Screen Shot 2021-01-27 at 7.42.30 PM.png

Video: Existence

January 12, 2021 in Isstillcools**t, Feature

In the Mutableye

One man realizes that he might just need a little help from an unlikely place to figure out how to be happy dating in a futile universe in this video by artist Jeremy Franklin-Ross.

One man realizes that he might just need a little help from an unlikely place to figure out how to be happy dating in a futile universe.

In the Mutableye is a segment that sometimes showcases something interesting that is happening somewhere in the world at this moment, and sometimes showcases some fad or person from the past that we here at Mutable acknowledge is still cool s**t.

Not Available (1 of 2)

January 12, 2021 in Article, Feature

D Howland Abbott

One night in the summer of 2000, I found myself standing in the corner of a tiny room which served as the broadcast booth for the college radio station at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. I had been dragged there by my girlfriend at the time, a woman named Bethany, who had developed a crush on the night-time DJ. It was 11:00pm, and as far as I could tell the three of us were the only people on campus.

“This is B.C. Sterret, and you are listening to Oddity Rock Radio on Weber State Eighty-Eight.” The DJ was speaking into the microphone, and partially obscured behind a wall of tape racks and soundboards. “Welcome once again to the single oasis in the vast cultural wasteland that we call the Beehive State.” I flinched. I had used those precise words in the moments before he went on the air, and he had stolen them.

The Hyperobject & the Artifice of Me

January 12, 2021 in Article, Letter from the Editor, Feature

Letter from the Editor

In this age of cultural criticism, punditry, general micro-blogging and endless gaffes, shock, and outrage on the Internet and beyond—although mostly on the internet, perhaps in part because it’s a place that exists nowhere, like the Na-koja-abad of muslim mysticism, the Persian term for utopia, which literally means, “the place that exists nowhere”—but also because it is currently the primary means through which we interact with our society and is furthermore the average American’s primary means for self-expression in general. This bodiless heaven, where we can instantly and immediately be gratified of any unbodily need we have while our actual bodies fester in the increasing hell of our actual room, is an interiority exposed and the internal uploaded into the closest our technology has come to mind, with servers as stand-ins for the more mundane ganglia of people and people as stand-ins for the more mundane mind of the masses.

CrimethInc. Manifesto Part 72-A

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

CrimethInc. Workers’ Collective

What is Crimethink?

Crimethink can be reached from the subway station only by means of a daring double somersault. It is only a multiple orgasm away from the checkout counter of the grocery store, and a mere lobbed brick distant from the witness bench of the courtroom, but it is much harder to access from the closed playpens of your homes, schools, workplaces, and punk rock clubs—only a mystical revelation or masterless revolution will suffice. Crimethink riots rather than diets, so as to love itself body and soul.

Sorry, Kale Drinkers: Trump’s Rampage Isn’t a Resurgence of American Bigotry or a Reichstag Fire—The Problem’s Less Sexy, More Fundamental

January 12, 2021 in Isstillcools**t, Feature

Thalatta Twice

The Praetorians, apprehensive that, in this private contract, they should not obtain a just price for so valuable a commodity, ran out upon the ramparts; and, with a loud voice, proclaimed that the Roman world was to be disposed of to the best bidder by public auction.

Screen Shot 2021-01-27 at 11.18.54 PM.png

HBD Katharine

January 12, 2021 in Podcast, Mutablesoundofthemonth, Feature

Mutable Sound of the Month

Mutable’s posting a little early for Valentine’s Day. This lovely ballad by Mutable’s own Animal Hospital is one of a series of songs Micka has recorded for his one and only Katharine. For more from Animal Hospital you can go here and for Good or Plenty, Streets + Plenty, out now by Mutable, you can go here.

I write and record a birthday song for Katharine every year.

Mutable is pleased to present a unique musical experience every month or so by ourselves or someone we’ve been introduced to. These are from the reel-to-reels and tascams of the garages and basements of the world. Send tracks to mail@mutablesound.com along with credits and a brief description.

The Incorrigible Michael Lewy

January 12, 2021 in Article, Isstillcools**t, Feature

In the Mutableye

Michael Lewy’s art exists in spaces that are often bare of even desolation, and utilizes common usually office-related objects to then re-interpret or re-examine them in an abstractified way. There is something very etherealized and conceptualizing about his CGI interpretations of office environments and other equally meaningless spaces, and something appealing too, but my favorite of Lewy’s works always have some sort of story to them—a simple image that suggests some larger story we are missing or a video project that is much about the back-story of his trapped minuscule double for example. (I am thinking of the video projection piece in the City of Work series, that gives us a glimpse of a minuscule Lewy in a CGI workplace dealing with his solitude poorly.)

Her Holiday Walk

January 12, 2021 in Story, Feature

Sayuri Yamada

Wendy McDermott was walking by a lake. It was her holiday. The sun was shining. She was happy. Her new white t-shirt and her new white jeans. Her twinkling blue eyes. Her bouncing brown hair. Her slender legs. Her long fingers. It was a nice sunny day.

There was nothing she had to do. She didn’t have to go to work. She didn’t have to ride on a crowded bus. She didn’t have to say, ‘You look nice,’ when her colleague asked about her new hair style. She didn’t have to smile at her boss when he told her that her report was full of holes that were big enough for RMS Titanic to go through. She didn’t have to say, ‘Sure,’ when snobby Jackie asked her to have lunch with her. She didn’t have to do the washing-up after supper in her small kitchen. She didn’t have to clean her room with lots of knickknacks.

There were many things she wanted to do. She wanted to drive around and park the car under a big tree and have a nap. She wanted to walk around and sit on the top of a hill and have a nap. She wanted to sleep in as long as she was pleased. She wanted to be up as late as she liked to. She wanted to watch TV if she woke up late at night without worrying about the next day.

The Hedonistic Imperative

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

David Pearce

A B S T R A C T

This manifesto outlines a strategy to eradicate suffering in all sentient life. The abolitionist project is ambitious, implausible, but technically feasible. It is defended here on ethical utilitarian grounds. Genetic engineering and nanotechnology allow Homo sapiens to discard the legacy-wetware of our evolutionary past. Our post-human successors will rewrite the vertebrate genome, redesign the global ecosystem, and abolish suffering throughout the living world.

il_340x270.985896377_6lz8a1-e1506997067607.png

If You're Going to Shave Down a Seal

January 12, 2021 in Story, Feature

Chris Braiotte

If you’re going to shave down a seal—and I’m seriously not suggesting that you do—you need to pay attention to the contours.

You see, most of a seal is smooth and uncomplicated, a long curlicue like a hairy Nike swoosh. You’ll get lulled into a long careless shave, and that’s when it’ll go wrong. Because there you are, zooming along, and blammo. Flipper changes the angle. You nick that seal right in the fold of his flipper, and then you’ve got a mostly hairless, bleeding, pissed off seal. And once that seal starts thrashing you’re both trapped in an upwelling cycle of blood and resentment.

The Glasgow Pineapple Baron

January 12, 2021 in Article, Feature

James Mansfield

1. Kelvinhall to Buchanan Street

The Glasgow subway system is an underground railway which is small enough to be disconcerting. The water running on the tracks at Kelvinhall was disorientating, and the bright orange decoration reminded me of the subway in Brussels, New York and Milan. But not London. Yet having spent some time away from the metropolis, to visit another city was reassuring. On the subway I was reading Paul Theroux’s 1975 book The Great Railway Bazaar in which he travels from London across Asia to Japan and back again.

My journey on the subway was 12 minutes long and I almost stayed on longer just to carry on reading. I should perhaps have been studying my fellow passengers in the four carriage trains which circular around the inner ring and outer ring of the Glasgow system. It was enough just to remain in the system, looking up at the same adverts for Glasgow in bright pink. This tropical shade reminded me of the jacket worn by Douglas Dalrymple, a 19th century explorer and businessman. While the painting of him (hanging in the Kelvingrove Museum) may have been over-restored, his pink jacket was unlikely to be something he had ever worn.

Radio Masquerading as Dust

January 12, 2021 in Article, Isstillcools**t, Feature

Gabriel Boyer

Within the first ten seconds of Bode Radio’s Dust Bowl Masquerade, the album defines itself as a jarring fusion of the exotic and the deranged. In the following twenty seconds you find yourself really enjoying yourself. Then the rug falls out from under you, and it continues to fall out from under you, and over you, and around you, until you are seeing sound in a very different very unsettling way. Dust Bowl Masquerade is both a frenetic piece of cut-up electronica as well as a very groove-oriented album from start to finish. I’d like to say it’s what it would sound like if The Books and Aphex Twin had a baby, but this baby belongs in a species all its own.

Mr. Shadow

January 12, 2021 in Podcast, Mutablesoundofthemonth, Feature

Mutable Sound of the Month

Scientists at SONY CSL Research Laboratory have created the first-ever entire songs composed by Artificial Intelligence: Mister Shadow. What was the inspiration behind the writing? We can only wonder. Welcome to the future!

Mutable is pleased to present a unique musical experience every month or so by ourselves or someone we’ve been introduced to. These are from the reel-to-reels and tascams of the garages and basements of the world. Send tracks to mail@mutablesound.com along with credits and a brief description.

Tom Clemmons, Frank, & the Found

January 12, 2021 in Article, Letter from the Editor, Feature

Letter from the Editor

Those of us who are ourselves involved in manufacturing the sorts of weirdness showcased in the award-winning film Frank are prone to be a little over-sensitive that others are chuckling darkly in corners at our futile efforts. We are the sensitive children others beat with mounds of dung. We are the ones who wore the dung-shirts for the sake of something greater than just coins of refined dung, but rather for the sake of the greater dung god in the sky sort of thing. Even while screaming silly that this omniscient dung being could never exist. What is Frank?

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas on Spiny Retinas!

January 12, 2021 in Article, Interview, Feature, Press

Gabe, you are writing to me from Tokyo.

Whenever I think of Tokyo, I can’t help but think of the film Lost in Translation. And I’m going there now (mentally) because Bill Murray starred in that film, and one of his great contemporaries, Robin Williams, tragically removed himself from this planet this past week. This also transitions into the questions you’ve asked me about my work, most relevantly, Spiny Retinas, because before Williams’ death, he was interviewed specifically about the perception of the “sad clown” archetype: what did mean to him, how did he relate (sadly, he fully committed to that life role).

I think of this specifically because I often use humor to confront personal challenges and I use it in my work to address the “darkness” of our times, which is what I believe Spiny Retinassomewhat deals with. In past work, I have let this sardonic voice come through a bit (e.g. my e-book from 2012, HONEY IS A SHE, often trails off into dark humor [it deals with going through a divorce]). More so with Spiny Retinas.