Animal Hospital‘s Kevin Micka makes beautiful music. His luscious soundscapes mesmerize as they dig deep in with loops that dig deep and wailing riffs that cut. Long ago, we were lucky enough to put out one of his albums, Good or Plenty, Streets + Avenues, and have been following his career since with a keen interest. His most recent album, Fatigue, due out April 24th by White Sepulchre Records, can be pre-ordered now either on vinyl or as a digital download on bandcamp. This most recent post-rock masterpiece is another gem on par with Memory—dark, transcendent, and a lush ambient listening experience. But don’t just take our word for it. Hear for yourself below!
Feature
Interview with Mike Sauve
What I am struck with in your work is the macabre playfulness. Would you like to talk about the relationship between comedy and pain in your writing?
As I respond to your questions, it is Christmas morn, and I have messaged several friends asking, “Know of any local bukkakes I might partake in?” This is not going to go over at my in-laws breakfast table, but to me it unearths something very vital: the vertex of all that Christmas is meant to mean with not only the lurid nature of the bukkake, but the logical extrapolation that:
1) Bukkakes are known to exist.
2) Since bukkakes are known to exist there must be men ever on the prowl for one.
As a lapsed journalist, I see little value in simply making ledger entries regarding the world’s immeasurable darkness. We know human’s heads have been stomped against curbs. We know people boil dogs alive to release an adrenaline they find flavourful. I’ve largely outgrown horror fiction as both a reader and as a writer because there isn’t a single thing Jack Ketchum or Stephen King might conceive of that anyone couldn’t find in the news were they motivated to look. And yet for me to write any alternative to the boiled dog reality results in platitudes that are worse than banal, they are insulting to the boiled dogs! Regardless, I must abide these platitudes. I must direct my feet to the sunny side of the street. I must live, laugh, and love to the extent I am capable. (I have gone calendar years without laughing aloud.) In this need for capital-P positivity, I find myself at the same sacred and profane vertex as the Christmas morning bukkake: taking a deep breath, practicing gratitude for my daily bread and NBA basketball and the more wholesome pornographic categories such as “nude breasts,” all while knowing perfectly well that the world is full of rotten old ragamuffins who needed to boil a dog alive rather than dead just so it would taste 5% more adrenaline-y or whatever. In other words, you got to laugh to keep from cryin’.
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Enter Mister Maurice (1 of 2)
William Levy
“Numberless are the world’s wonders,
but none more wonderful than man.”
– Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus
For over half-a-century whenever authors met talk would eventually come around to the maverick Maurice Girodias, and his Olympia Press. Did you or didn’t you? Did you or didn’t you hit him for money? Did you or didn’t you hear about what he had just published? Written. Done. Amazing really. Awesome. He seemed to internationally float about on some magic carpet surrounded by a suave fog both elegant and dangerous, ecstatic and ironic. For all the writers who claimed Maurice “ripped me off” there was an equal amount that used him. For every novelist like J. P. Donleavy—who had a justifiable vendettic rage against Maurice and spent an enormous amount of time and energy pursuing it, finally buying back the rights to The Ginger Man at public auction—there were versifiers like Christopher Logue. Plagiarist or premature post-modern deconstructionalist? According to a rare bookseller’s catalog, Count Palmiro Vicarion’s Book of Limericks was “in fact, almost entirely lifted by Logue from G. Legman’s then recent The Limerick, from a copy borrowed and not even bought.”
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LA in the End Times
Letter from the Editor
Fruit seeds sat in the fruit are like as pieces of wood set in the middle of a sweet veil of meat. When some sliver of wood comes free from the seed to sit in a jiggling yellow mango slice, for example, it Is like a solitary tooth sat in some otherwise free-floating gums. It is like witnessing a breach in the universe.
I moved to LA—which is also like a breach in the universe—or more as like a rift between the larger storytelling worlds of Hollywood and the everyday mundane walking around world of Target and Marshall’s. This is before any end of the world began, and back when Bladerunner had a quaint other-worldly quality to it, back when we were all content to live through scenes that have only been touched by the barest inkling of realism. There are still the same homes in the hillocks that are like slices of marble arranged decoratively upon the horizon, and it still seems people here can glide on through to the other side powered only by the brilliance of their bling, but—as we do indeed slide into the unacceptable end times, making the occasional detour through places of no clear definition—as our mouths veer out of themselves in our horror and our eyes become shrink-wrapped in tears—what apocalypse is being written? Here in this shifting miasma in the desert? Are the fires rising? Are the water lapping at our shoes? Do the bureaucrats hint at darker goings on in the pantries just outside the halls of justice? Are the piles of the dead truly alarming?
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Video: Sophia Darby
Mutable Sound of the Month
On a quiet summer evening some several months ago, I found myself sitting out on the grass beside a farm in New Hampshire, while on a haybed left parked just by the sheep pen a pair of musicians were in the middle of the most dreamy set of folk-pop. Later, I was to learn the singer-songwriter who stood with her hair perched on top of her head was Sophia Darby. Her voice has a similar lilting confessional style as Cat Power—the same casual almost lullaby quality that I enjoyed so much on early Cat Power masterpieces, such as Moon Pix and Covers—Sophia Darby has the power though to grab your attention and keep it there. I hope you enjoy this other candid video. Someone please produce her album!
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.
Video: Eternal Family
In the Mutableye
Mac Demarco has long been known as an inveterate weirdo, but we here at Mutable went down a bit of a k-hole that began with the remarkable video to Here Comes the Cowboy, which introduced us to Cole Kush, of the GIMME SUMMN video fame, and from there, we discovered the wonderful world of Eternal, with its bizarre collage vignettes and delightful stock footage, and tips on how to set up your own recording studio or write a killer pop song. We were sold on the idea immediately. This is an artist-run streaming service with 60% of the funds going to the artists, and the rest to operations. And it’s a delight! Check out the trailer below.
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 Unraveling Prism
Gabriel Boyer
1. You Get up in the Morning
You get up in the morning, and you go to our job, and you do whatever it is you’ve been trained to do, through school and circumstance, and you come home to this place that you call yours, except for maybe it’s just a rented bit of flooring in some basement and beside a work desk or under someone else’s pillow, but you got a stove to heat your food, and maybe someone to talk to, maybe not, and the years pile on the years, and your body turns to a more brittle version of your body and maybe every once in a while something shatters or starts to wobble in its seat of cartilage. Eventually, one of these things will end you. Is this the dream?
Read MoreThis Alienated Hero: A Review of Gabriel Chad Boyer's Welcome to Weltschmerz
Matt Ampleman
Originally published in The Lit Pub 9.21.12
I wanted to walk away from this book as if a newly single man from a conflict-wrought relationship. I wanted to forego any sense of duty to the protagonist and his attendant world. But I had to see things through.
Friends, to read Gabriel Chad Boyer’s book, Welcome to Weltschmerz, is to enter into a conversation with an interlocutor that will break all the rules of polite authorship, but you find you cannot leave for niceties sake, for interest, then for sheer incredulity and inspiration at the arc of the story before you. It is like talking to a homeless man, at whom you are nodding out of politeness until you realize that he knows every line of John Berryman’s Dream Songs and can recite them backwards.
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Neptune
Neptune was one of those bands that for the longest time the quintessential Boston art rock band. Jason was one of the first people to start hosting performance art in his loft in JP back in 1994, and his handmade scrap metal guitars have become symbols of another time in Boston—when the apocalypse was a quaint fantasy we longed for with baited breath rather than the disappointing s**tshow it’s turned out to be. Although, Jason has since moved on to the equally remarkable E with Thalia Zedek of Live Skull and Uzi fame, we will always remember with great fondness the mesmerizing grittiness of this particular long-running Sanford project. I will never forget standing in the dark of the Middle East and knocking my head back and forth to the rhythm of beer bottles being smashed in a generic metal trash can as the home-made guitars thrashed and Jason cut new grooves in his throat with his incomparable screams. All lovers of 90’s rock should have a copy of the recently re-released Studio Recordings.
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.
Places Outside of Place (2 of 2)
Luther Philips
3.
Imaginary Realm: History, Memory, & Self
“Answer my prayer, God, and tell me, pitiable as I am, be pitiful to me and tell me this: did I have another period of life, which died and was succeeded by my infancy? Was this the period which I spent inside my mother’s womb,” (Augustine, Confessions, p. 22)
~
Both Thomas More and his friend Desiderius Erasmus were humanists. Meaning specifically that they emphasized the dignity of Man and the power of Reason while remaining deeply committed to Christianity, and through all of his many successes—entering the service of King Henry VIII in 1518, becoming Chancellor in 1529—More remained a profoundly religious Catholic. Because he couldn’t escape his desire for a wife, More chose to become a “chaste husband rather than a licentious priest” but all the same longed for a Christian vita contemplativa from early youth, and throughout his life, More followed many of the ascetic practices of monks: rising early, fasting, engaging in prolonged prayer, and wearing a hair shirt. He also was famous for his immense poverty.
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This is Not a Review: of Haints Stay
Gabriel Boyer
Haints Stay is something like as if Cormac McCarthy’s bloody West were touched by the hand of Samuel Beckett, and something of the aesthetic spirit child of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, except for more honest. It breathes through its bloody teeth and sings in places you thought were immune to song. It has a power that is difficult for a reader to reconcile themselves with, but also difficult to turn away from, or something like rubbernecking a divine accident.
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Egoes War
Mutable Sound of the Month
This Afrofuturist freak-out by Nicole Mitchell from Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds—available May 5th from Chicago-based FPE Records—blurs the edges between philosophy and mysticism, modern art and radical political critique. Inspired by the brilliant Afrofuturist author Octavia Butler, Nicole Mitchell dares to use science fiction to pose the question, “What would a world look like that is truly egalitarian, with advanced technology that is in tune with nature?” Enjoy!
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.
Thrilling Fantasy, Horror, & Science-Fiction Shorts!
A D Jameson
Alien Spores
Can you help me? I’ve been trying to rid this city of alien spores. I thought I’d eliminated them all, but now I see they’re back again. I must have missed a few, and they replicate so quickly! It seems no matter how many I destroy, I always find a few more the following days; they’re extraordinarily resilient. I’ve been asking others to give me a hand, stressing the threat posed by alien spores, but no one I talk to seems to think that the spores pose as big a threat as I do. But they are a real threat! If the spores get inside your nose, they go up in your brain, and then they completely warp your priorities, make you forget who you are as well as your everyday life, make you see things that aren’t really there.
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The Conscience of a Hacker
The Mentor
The following was written shortly after my arrest…
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Another one got caught today, it’s all over the papers. “Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal”, “Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering”…
Damn kids. They’re all alike.
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Video: M. Lamar
We here at Mutable are old enough to remember a time when performance art was everywhere you went. Maybe not everywhere YOU went, but everywhere we went. In every loft and coffee shop of 90’s Boston, on the loading bays of Brooklyn, and in the pizza parlors of Cleveland. It was inescapable. Then one day it vanished, and instead the world was waiting in line for the latest iPhone update. But M. Lamar, with his remarkable fashion sense, idiosyncratic sensibilities, impressive musical abilities and often poignant commentary, is keeping this tradition alive, and our hats go off to him. Below is a video of his performance, Re-Memberments / The Demon Rising.
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.
Return to the Secret Fort
Scott Rucker
The Woods, 1909
Our secret fort deep in the woods, was a real work in progress. It smelled like piss. Our gang was made up of neighborhood riff raff. Roger was the oldest, then came Benny, myself, and a boy we referred to as, The Jew. Each of us had our own special gift. Roger had charisma. Benny had the strength of an ox. I had the smarts. The Jew was a talented artist. For a penny, he would draw you whatever you wanted.
We kept our dirty pictures and a series of cuss words in a hole we had dug where we also kept our communal cigarettes, and cologne which we used to cloak the scent.
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A day about the British Museum
James Mansfield
I remember visiting the British Museum as a child, when I must have been around five or six, with my father. I say this, but actually can remember nothing from the visit apart from my insistence that we make the return journey by taxi, as I was bored of not seeing anything on the underground. I have since then been to the Museum countless times, and now having founded my own Museum of Imaginative Knowledge, had a strong desire to try and spend some time there for the purpose of what I call pure research, or simply just hanging out. What would it be like to spend an entire day in the British Museum?
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Places Outside of Place (1 of 2)
Luther Philips
1.
Places and People: Adam, Eve, & Prometheus
“And I wish that I were not any part / of that fifth generation / of men, but had died before it came, / or been born afterward,” (Hesiod. Trans. Richard Lattimore. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969; p. 39).
~
Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge. The true and honest experience of their former idyllic lives was now sullied by a pervasive internal vision. They knew that they were and they became conscious.
There’s that old adage that people are gods that shit. We can envision this as the story of an Adam and an Eve happily shitting away in Eden day in day out until that moment they discovered the God in them (i.e. the moment they ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil), and never again would they be able to so blissfully vacate their bowels in the bosom of nature as once they had done. This is the quintessential tale of the noble savage—in which humanity is pure, ignorant and blissful—but there is a snake in this garden.
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Toward an Apocalyptic Literature
Letter from the Editor
We have officially entered the Apocalyptic Age.
And as we sit in our rooms writing our precious notes—our lists of what we’ll miss most and how we want our survivors to dress the corpses we leave behind—scrawling these thoughts on bits of paper and the odd receipt—as we wait for the door to be knocked in by the stormtroopers of the future—we must not look away from this dark rising. Rather than censoring ourselves, we must take this opportunity to speak the most terrifying of truths, for this may be the last moment we get to say anything at all before the duct tape is slathered across our snot-slick lips and we are bound to the particular vision of reality the cruel and heartless among us want to seer upon our skulls. Which is not to say that we should stare into the coming darkness with the timid paralysis of deer, but to stand with a pathetic confidence that we can withstand this blow of history even if it means everything we thought to be true turned false, and everything we hold dear crushed to dust by the oppressors among us. This is the literature for the end times.
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S**theads: In the Mutableye
The Captured Project originated as an online collection of drawings. In each portrait was depicted some person of note who should be in prison, and each of these portraits were themselves drawn by current prisoners. The project has since come to a close and a book has been printed of these many remarkable works of art, capturing such notable criminals as Ryan Gragg of Goldman Sachs and of course the Koch brothers. Please feel free to click through to look at more for yourself, and consider purchasing a book. All proceeds go to the Brooklyn Bail Fund. You can learn more about the project and how to purchase the book here, and can click on the image to find out what crimes have been committed by Rex Tillerson.