Boo Boo in a moment of pique.
The Narrator is acting strangely, but why? Don’t worry. It’s unimportant. Even if you think it’s actually the most important thing, you are quite wrong. Actually, what you should be paying attention to is the portal that’s opened up behind the young scholar Simone’s head for it is a portal into Hell itself, one that is crying out for it will have the girls Simone and, dare I sat it? Boo Boo?
Mutable Sound Chicago, Illinois Mutable Sound is an online gallery for sound and word located in Chicago, IL. We are dedicated to publishing works in all genres, from the dense and inextricable to the light-hearted and absurd, and release albums that are experiments more than anything else, without being particularly experimental.
On the woman’s first day at work the poet helped her with her boxes, but as he was helping he was looking away.
“Do you know this is my seventieth sick day since I started here?” he asked.
“But you’re here,” she said.
“Yes, I know.” And he went to the bathroom and peed blood.
—from, The Poet and the Philosopher as Roommates
We here at Mutable first heard of Sheila Heti some six or seven years ago, when she went on tour with the event she founded, Trampoline Hall, while promoting her first book, The Middle Stories, put out by McSweeney’s. We were taken by her stories, and she has continued to tickle and tug at our interest both in her own writing and in the projects she involves herself in.
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(Below is the first of a two-part conversation we had with Animal Hospital concerning what he [Kevin Micka] has been doing, what he will do, what he sounds like, metal, and other topics of interest. Please do not be alarmed at the shocking content of this interview. Trained professionals were at the ready, as will you be, for this is Animal Hospital as you have never seen him before.)
GABRIEL BOYER: So there was was was was. What made you decide to start start Animal Hospital?
ANIMAL HOSPITAL: Um. The girl’s dating at the time. We wanted. We were planning a trip. Um. To go to a comic convention and go visit her family.
GB: Mhm.
AH: So we were planning on going to San Diego and Santa Fe.
GB: Mhm.
AH: Um. So. [Clears throat.] Thought I would try to come up with something to do on the tour. On the trip. To play some shows and help pay for some gas.
GB: Mhm.
AH: See some friends and stuff on the way.
GB: Mhm.
AH: So I um. Started booking some shows.
GB: Mhm.
AH: Before I had like a real plan of what I was going to do.
GB: [Enthusiastically] Mhm.
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Dear Balilla Pratella, great Futurist composer,
In Rome, in the Costanzi Theatre, packed to capacity, while I was listening to the orchestral performance of your overwhelming Futurist music, with my Futurist friends, Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, Balla, Soffici, Papini and Cavacchioli, a new art came into my mind which only you can create, the Art of Noises, the logical consequence of your marvelous innovations.
Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men. For many centuries life went by in silence, or at most in muted tones. The strongest noises which interrupted this silence were not intense or prolonged or varied. If we overlook such exceptional movements as earthquakes, hurricanes, storms, avalanches and waterfalls, nature is silent.
Amidst this dearth of noises, the first sounds that man drew from a pieced reed or streched string were regarded with amazement as new and marvelous things. Primitive races attributed sound to the gods; it was considered sacred and reserved for priests, who used it to enrich the mystery of their rites.
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Today is a free for all of whatever music we feel like playing. If you have a request just send it psychically to us in the past, while here in the present, Gabe will be reading from various situationist comic strips for Book You! this week, not to mention Gabe’s Guide to Getting Lost. Also, this week, the pipes are angry because Gabe is about to head out to Eugene, OR, and Malcolm is about to go on tour (as Lineland) and with Animal Hospital, all of which means this will be our last podcast (though episodes of Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies will continue to be posted weekly for those of you who have become addicted to this touching tale), which means that at last we are free, and we can hardly see in front of us. Indeed.
I guess 2009 is officially Animal Hospital’s coming out party. I first became smitten (and rightly so) by the release of Memory on the illustrious Barge imprint and apparently this little puppy preceded Memory by a month, so it looks like I am taking in the releases in reverse order. Of course, this matters not at all. A cursory listen to either album would quickly lead a listener to the other release on the basis of sheer goodness. Oh Animal Hospital, will you never stop healing our poor pets and wild Earthly co-inhabitants? Hopefully not. Good or Plenty, Streets + Avenues is a wonderful addition to the Animal Hospital repertoire that was presented on Memory. The album avoids the lengthy, dramatic surgeries displayed on that release and instead focuses on the standard day to day operations of animal hospitalateering: daily check-ups, medicine prescriptions, happy customers. GorP,S+A is a light hearted dip into the joys of healing animals via layers and layers of homespun loops. As a refresher for those who were unable to wade through my lengthy review of Memory (or simply missed it altogether), Animal Hospital is not “Animal Hospitals.” It is a single edifice and as such is the pseudonym designated for a single musician from Boston named Kevin Micka. Micka’s work here is built around his slowly evolving and elaborate looping of guitars, percussion and electronics. Unlike Memory, GorP,S+A steers clear of weighty crescendos and instead offers beautifully intricate character sketches with each track. In a way, this kind of meandering structure is harder to pull off, but Micka proves ownership of a keen ear and adept musicianship by executing each track with the utmost precision and always keeping things interesting. Good or Plenty, Streets + Avenues is one of those rare albums I’ve found that I can always listen to even when nothing else will do. Really solid work.
This is the podcast you’re going to want to listen to only once, those albums you get at the record store and you’re like whoa, and then you never listen to them again. These songs are like strange dreams that you tell your friends, and make Gabe think of the strangeness of life and the strangeness of fiction, about who we are, and we’re going, and why we’re going there, which may be partially because Gabe is about to move to Eugene, OR to work as a wildland fire-fighter, which he really thought he would never do a second time, while Malcolm once went to a laser light show which was terrible, but he’s glad he went the one time to get it over with, although most of Gabe’s stories of things he is glad he only did once are not for virgin ears and so if you want to hear his humiliating tales write to mail@mutablesound.com. At some point in the hour Gabe has a breakdown concerning the fact that he and Malcolm in fact listen to many of these one-time albums over and over again, and Malcolm cannot believe that Gabe is actually afraid that Van Dyke Parks could perhaps listen to this podcast and come away with the belief that we do not hold him in the highest esteem, which would be false. This week for Book You! we read I Was a Teeny-Bopper for the CIA, by Ted Mark. Listen to the podcast from start to finish, and you’ll hear Gabe use the word “periphery” once too often.
Menehune Santa
Originally published in Metropolinvisible
The first decade of the twenty-first century is almost over, and we still consider the post-rock reservoir of musical innovation to be pure folly. Though there are still bands that can interpret the sounds of Mogwai & Co. with extreme precision and dignity (see “our” Port Royal, the Low Frequency in Stereo, This Will Destroy You and a few others), it is undeniable that the vast majority of contemporary post-rock is marked by what can only be termed a mannerist period.
Precisely because of these considerations, the work of Kevin Micka (formerly of the Common Cold) and his Animal Hospital takes on a more pronounced value because it manages to escape from the net of label support, showing an attitude that reminds us of another time, about fifteen years back, when post-rock was anything but a simple genre, instead representing a global transformation of music.
Five years after he started his official one man band, in 2009 this Boston feels that he has lots to say, releasing two albums in short order: “Memory” (published in early March by Barge recordings), and the latest “Good or Planty, Streets + Avenues.” The latter contains a number of tracks recorded by Kevin in an off-handed manner between 2007 and 2008, which were only later collected in a single record.
And it is perhaps because of this extemporaneous quality that the full expressive power of Animal Hospital is unleashed here, that after the intro of “We can” invades our senses, “Novel Moments” opens with a visionary drone-folk imbued the best of Roy Montgomery. The slight sway and move of “March and June,” calibrated by the beautiful voice of Katharine Fisk Shields, pleasantly recalls the atmosphere of winking Aerial M, while the quasi-fennesziana “11:18:07” with its harsh environment and “What If They Are Friendly” appear to be symptoms of a deviated isolationism and convulsive. The electroacoustic interlude of “Good or plenty” then ferries in the final part of the disc, which is more properly post-rock. “Define” is poised between Tortoise on the one hand, and Fly Pan Am on the other, while “Barnyard Creeps” recalls the valuable with elaborate textures of Windsor for the Derby sometimes topped with glimmers of noise, and the concluding “Labor Day” is an array of environmental and noisy psychedelic abstraction which seems vaguely reminiscent of the settled cosmic country of Rex. The post-rock of the 90’s was an open laboratory for testing and contamination: Animal Hospital has revived that spirit and the rest of us will never be grateful enough.
(The above article was translated from the original Italian by the editors with the help of Google Translate. We apologize for any mistakes.)
Another themed podcast this week. This week we are going to be doing story songs, or songs that tell a story. We live lives that are stories in themselves, although the never-ending story, or rather eventually it ends but Gabe won’t be around to see the credits, but there sure are a wide range of story songs, from first person story of my life sort of thing, to third person, to back and forth dialogue, and we explore them in traditional british folk, country western, soul music and on the whole a lot of sad songs, though sometimes these tears aren’t tears of sorrow, but tears of joy at some absurd rendition of another’s suffering, from death row to blindness to those who are checking out when others are checking in. She was supposed to be at home minding the kids, but alas she was at the motel. Gabe and Malcolm argue about whether Famous Blue Raincoat qualifies as a story song, and then of course, there’s our own story, Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies, still running with episode 22 this week, in which you’ll find demon possession on all sides and a tryst interrupted midcoitus, and for Book You! this week Gabe reads from a collection of short stories by George Saunders called In Persuasion Nation.
Originally published by Penny Black Music 04.25.2009
Named after the 19th century Hungarian composer, the Liszts, however, are a combo singing in both Mandarin and English alike. Their diction and phrasing give away an American heritage and while (obviously I cannot account for having any detection quality when the language in question originates from a country I have never been to) also that of China. As foreign as that may all seem, the Liszts deal in rather familiar ethics. And before you even became aware of it, the Liszts embrace sounds that one would not be able tell apart from that of other established indie rock or college radio starlets, so let us forget about any exotic ethnicity for once.
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In your headphones, in your speakers, in your heart, we play music. This week is dedicated to hip hop, so if you don’t like the rap music you might want to skip this week, but if you do, you might want to turn it up! For this week on Book You, Gabe reads from I Paid My Dues by Babs Gonzales. Gabe wants to send his throat to its room without dinner. We would like to put out a disclaimer this week, some listener discretion is advised.
Boyer’s influences range from William Faulkner to David Lynch, from Hunter S. Thompson to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Jorge Luis Borges. A Survey of My Failures this Far, his third book to be released through Mutable, is on the one hand just what it purports to be, a collection of materials (mostly narrative) from Boyer’s library of unpublished manuscripts, but it aspires to be something more, and perhaps herein lies the failure, what Faulkner called the “splendid failure to do the impossible.” Descriptions of each individual book within the larger collection to be found below.
The Many Lives of Yours Truly
A collection of stories about a single character, Bosworth Paine. It is a collection within a collection and opens with a passage that could perhaps describe the author’s relation to Survey as a whole, “This is how it is for me. I am so many different sorts of people it makes me want to stick my fingers in your mouth.” Many of these stories return to his adolescence, and an obsession with one woman in particular, for she was tied to another Bosworth could only grin in the face of so much suffering, rather than always muttering obscenities in the corner.
Jacks and Jill’s Sunshine Retreat Center
A psychedelic horror comedy that takes place on a wellness retreat just outside Santa Fe New Mexico and run by a man name of Colin Jacks. Persons have begun to disappear at an alarming rate. “And besides, you have warts on your penis.” Similar sorts of witty banter to be found within.
Chewing in the Land of the Bonobos
Characters A and B throw seeds in a bucket, and occasionally attempt to bed each other, while watching the development of war, agriculture, and ultimately resort hotels.
Devil, Everywhere I Look
An economic collapse has brought the end of the United States of America, a civil war having raged ever since, and Jackson Cole, political pamphleteer by profession, is becoming more and more caught up in a greater game of political intrigue with every step he takes, only to finally discover the truth about his younger brother’s death at the same time he finds himself addicted to the new hallucinogenic narcotic some claim is transforming humanity into an altogether different species, these being the last days before The Atlantic Bloc fell to the Midland Coalition in this post-apocalyptic nightmare world.
The God Game
A gaming manual, in which you play the game by creating the game, the God Game begins with an exploration of basic games, though the bulk of the manuscript involves universe creation and ultimately LARPing the God Game. “Does the ground consist of spires that reach to the tips of the atmosphere, or is the entire orb made up of a teaming mass of encephalocapsules?” Many questions are posed. Few are answered!
The Manikin Textbook
We open on the protagonist’s adolescence, spent as a fugitive whore in the Capital of the North American Districts, obviously modeled after New York. Then it is ten years later, and now our protagonist (also Colin Jacks) is married with children and concealing contraband information within his larger memory template. Throughout his travels he will meet a woman infested with multi-dimensional carniverous vegetation who believes he is the messiah, a man who leads him through the underground facilities where dreams are developed and propagated upon an unsuspecting populace, and ultimately a shape-changing agent of the Ministry of the Morning Star.
Shorthand with Periodic Tenderness
A collection of the sorts of poems P. K. Dick’s androids would write, especially the more abstract (such as one entitled “The Myth of Technology” which involves the repeated re-arrangement of six words), although there are more traditional poems in here. “In the Smallest Hours of the Night”, for example, contains the lines, “Face as beautiful as any god’s / Androgynous icon / And as present as crumpled sheets,” but many seem as if concocted by some computer in an effort to simulate intelligence.
Don’t let me down tomorrow, you. We’re living in a fantasyland of our own creation made up of nostalgia. What about you? Gabe can’t wait till we get to hell. What about you? On the 10th of April Gabe’s book A Survey of My Failures This Far will be released and on the 1st Big Trouble in Little China by the Liszts will be released. What about you? This week’s Book You features a reading from David Lee Roth’s autobiography, Crazy from the Heat. Felder of the Dark Cloth, what about you?
Besides being a frequent cause for derision from my fiance, music that falls into the “ambient-drone” category is a staple for me. It lends itself to heavy headphone affairs in which I can be completely lost in washes of synths and looped guitar distortion to a diligent companion to late night War and Peace read-a-thons with Addy. The only downside is that when I hear an amazing instrumental album I immediately get a sense of sadness once the giddiness goes away, I think, when am I going to listen to this again? When can I recapture the thrill of the first time I heard this? The good thing about bands that fall into the ambient drone camp is that they always retain a sense of “newness” at every listen, without recognizable hooks or melodies each song is a limitless resource of sounds and musical ideas that gather weight with each listen. Animal Hospital’s Good or Plenty is an album in which every song is as fresh and exciting as it was on first listen (as exciting as an ambient drone album can be). is a remarkable recording full of sunny, beautifully recorded instrumental forays into sound and texture. Kevin Micka is a masterful sound manipulator, taking seemingly standard song arrangements of guitars, drums, turntables, hand claps and the human voice and creates looping soundscapes that are rife with discovery. Never giving into the temptation to let his wanderings turn into an irrelevant wad of noise, Micka lets his instruments prop up each song giving them of a depth of a fully fleshed out pop song. His layers of shiny guitar washes over processed feedback and manipulation put him in the ranks of Aidan Baker and Christian Fennez, while his aural dexterity and dedication to creating beautiful soundscapes recall a Talk Amongst the Trees era Matthew Cooper. Good or Plenty is what I am guessing is a companion to his full length put out on the amazing Barge Records earlier this year, I’m guessing they both go in my list of favorite instrumental albums of the year.
Remember way back when… Of course Malcolm and Gabe remember. Throughout the last few shows there has been much reminiscing, but also much taking too seriously, and during this show perhaps a little less. Post-punk? Grunge? Retro? Yay! Gabe is living in the 90’s, as are the people of Eugene where Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies was Recorded. “Thereby by the grace of God, go I.” For Book You! this week Gabe reads from Kurt Cobain’s favorite book, Perfume, by Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. Gabe almost fell through the earth in the 90’s. What about you? Both Malcolm and Gabe have enjoyed watching Friends recently just for its nostalgia factor (no cell phones), and are now convinced the 90’s saw a “renaissance of humor”, although honestly that’s nothing compared to other more notorious renaissances, of Harlem and Florence to name just two.
Big Trouble in Little China captures what it can’t capture, to become more than just an album, but a romance between one culture and another, one person and another, one dream and another, between those of us scuttling across the ocean floor, and those who stand above us, between the losers and the lost, the great home in the heavens, and the one we don’t want to go home to. We get saccharine as we get older, but what does it matter when all you got left is memories?
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Malcolm and Gabe are continuing their tip of the hat to the Facebook phenomenon and specifically what is commonly known as the List Phenomenon, and this week it is the list of songs that changed the way Gabe thinks about music, a sort of musical autobiography. From high school and Thelonius Monk, to Daniel Johnston at the office, is it possible that Gabe has lived his life solely for the purpose of creating the perfect mix tape? From Malcolm and Gabe’s first meeting at the Coolidge Corner Movietheater, to cokeheads in Brooklyn and raw sewage shooting out of the toilet, to the year Gabe wouldn’t leave the couch. This week for Book You, Gabe reads from his own A Survey of My Failures this Far, to be released by Mutable Sound on April 10th, the release party to be held at Quimby’s in Wicker Park, Chicago, at 7 pm, with the cover band, Normal Feelings. And of course another episode of Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies.
1
America hates sex in general, but it especially hates orgasms, the pinnacle of the experience. It hates that which it doesn’t understand.
2
America if nothing else is an ideological construct. But so is sex, and so especially is orgasm.
3
The value is on change, and the rapidity of it. Burn your bridges. Don’t look back. This doesn’t change the way it worked for millennia but a kind of hyper-change, or high-speed motion that moves us out of a Newtonian sociality into chaos. Orgasm then becomes a strange attractor.
4
As such attractors, orgasms undo all this. They are a mode of resistance, if viewed in these admittedly fake political terms. This is the old boring tale of subversion of desire. Romanticism, really.
5
Orgasms happen in bed (usually) just as naming happens in print or through an electronic medium (usually). Or in the streets through spontaneous linguistic intervention. What I am calling naming as a language function always is embedded. We go to bed for very few purposes: to sleep, to dream, to make love, to give birth, to be ill, and to die.
Another week in your ears. Malcolm has been getting inundated by invitations to write his favorite records of all-time on Facebook. Apologies for even mentioning Facebook, but be that as it may, some people have lists concerning music that shaped their lives, which is something like ripping your skin off. Instead of playing his favorite records, however, Malcolm is going to play records he thinks you should own that you probably don’t. Gabe’s life has been full of discoveries, of an aural, visual, and tactile variety. Among Malcolm’s favorite discoveries was Bruce Haack, while for Gabe perhaps it was the french film, Fantastic Planet. A whole new dimension to hearing? Your legs are gone? Speaking of legs, it’s interesting the different directions the different Beatles took when they split up. This week, for Book You, Gabe reads from The Idler’s Glossary by Joshua Glenn, published last year through Biblioasis. Gabe thinks one of Malcolm’s purposes on this globe is to educate people concerning the world of sound, although Malcolm finds this to be a bit presumptuous and describes himself instead as the creepy guy at the record store. The podcast ends with episode seventeen of the radioplay, Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies.
“In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind, there are no limits… In the province of connected minds, what the network believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the network’s mind there are no limits,” Lilly, J. C. (1974). The Human Biocomputer. London: Abacus.
For this second Letter from the Editor, I wanted to speak about one of my favorite philosophers of the 20th Century, John C. Lilly.
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