About Mutable

It’s not easy to describe Mutable. We’ve been a label, a collective, a brand, and of course, we are none of these things because we are mutable. At it’s core, Mutable is the artists we love, and the world which they have created. It is paperbacks written by fresh new voices, transcendent home recordings, experimental theater in people’s homes, massive tomes of science fiction, pseudo-children’s albums on colored vinyl, performances in dark Vietnamese cafés. It’s a world that’s always shifting and expanding. Mutable.

Enjoymutable.com is your opportunity to engage with the Mutable world. Not only can you find news and information about your favorite Mutable artists, but it also sheds light on other work that inspires us, the inner thoughts that consume us, and puzzling cultural phenomena. Enjoymutable.com is also where you can support our family of artists by purchasing some of those products mentioned above. And finally, it is the place to enjoy a vast selection of online content created exclusively for enjoymutable.com. From short stories, to interviews, to radio plays, enjoymutable.com aims to provide you access to a seemingly endless library of original material. And, of course, we hope to continue to push the envelope of this medium to allow our artists to fully realize the potential of this digital canvas.

And what makes a Mutable artist? At first, it was just a tight knit group of creative friends (read about our history here) forming Mutable in an effort to find strength in numbers. As it grew, and more artists gravitated to us and found shade under our umbrella, a particular Mutable aesthetic began to reveal itself. Our work is unexpected, often absurd and irreverent, personal and uncompromising, informed equally by obscure texts and popular cinema, yet wholly original. And most importantly, this aesthetic is bound to change and mutate because the Mutable artist is restless, and we welcome this uncertainty.

Another way to look at it? As Mark Fisher writes in his unfinished ‘Acid communism’: “Instead of seeking to overcome capital, we should focus on what capital must always obstruct: the collective capacity to produce, care and enjoy.”

We are Mutable. Enjoy.

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Submissions:

We’re always looking for more contributors to our site and artists to be part of our growing family. Please send any work or proposals to mail@mutablesound.com

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Join us:

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PERSONNEL

Gabriel Boyer President

Malcolm Felder CMO

Zachary Katz Founder

Scotto Consultant-at-large

Beta Male

Beta Male is first and foremost a bunch of idiots in the woods. It is Adam Scotto, Gabriel Boyer, and Malcolm Felder. It is three days in the woods, complaining and occasionally recording. For those three days we were beta males, and the result is the album Battery Power.

Releases

Happiness Island

Happiness Island is an idea. It’s a place, but the sort of place you visited once in your dreams and then turned away from. Malcolm first got the idea from his forays into the children’s albums of yesteryear and spent over a year coaxing Gabriel to accept his particular aesthetic vision. Gabriel wrote Don’t Set Your Sights Too High, which was funny and brechtian, but also Boingo the Nihilist Bear, which went too far. Then, one Friday in December of 2000, Gabriel made his way down to New York, and the two of them discussed this project for the last time, and while listening to Malcolm’s extended collection, Gabriel finally began to understand. Malcolm put on his funniest voice and sang, ”People think that chipmunks got high voices, but they don’t,” and Gabriel burst into laughter.

The other musicians arrived the following day, and recording began. No one knew where to start. Then the various players had come down for this began improvising and Gabriel started improvising a song of his own. ”Happiness is wherever you are,” he sang. Their journey had begun.

Two days later, the recording finished, everyone returned to their former lives, and Malcolm began the arduous process of putting the pieces together to make this thing into something approached listenability. The songs had been recorded largely in chronological order, but there were pieces missing, and sounds and exposition to be added. It would be a year before his own journey was finished, and he brought it to Boston, to introduce A Journey to Happiness Island to persons might laugh and coo, or sputter in their confusion, but it existed all the same, and now years later perhaps now he can admit that his failure was a success all along.

Releases

‘A Journey to Happiness Island’ was recorded in a weekend. The product of years of conniving on the part of Malcolm Felder. Happiness Island isn’t Sappiness Island, anymore.