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.

Chinese TV, Cities, Quantum Brain

January 12, 2021 in Podcast, Series, Three Things

Three things Episode 7

This week on Three Things, we talk about the madness of Chinese TV, how we ended up where we have, and the quantum brain. Join us as we wonder through the corridors of media, our lives, and the larger universe as we do every week. To see some of the Chinese TV we watched go here, here, and for a more in depth picture, here.

Three Things is Gabriel Boyer, Malcolm Felder, & Adam Scotto. Every episode one of them brings up one topic that has been bothering them this week, and they discuss it. You can subscribe to this podcast here. That’s it!

*Click on Wes to read all our letters to him.*

The Wes Letters: Feliz, Letter 2

January 12, 2021 in Excerpt, Story, The Wes Letters, Series

Feliz Lucia Molina

February 9, 2012
12:54pm

Dear Wes,
Have you watched the 1960s documentary Endless Summer? After drive-thru at In-N-Out I went home and turned on Netflix. The sunny California male voiceover truly lifts my heart. And I never say lifts my heart. That two surfer friends went around the world searching for the perfect wave is a cute representation of a philosophy of sport or aesthetics of time. Do you know Roland Barthes’ little masterpiece What Is Sport? I wonder what he would have said about surfing.

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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.

What Goes Up Must Come Down (Pt 1)

January 12, 2021 in Podcast, Apocryphal Histories, Series

Gabriel Boyer

A detective in Beijing finds a dead foreigner up a tree in the small forest beside the new mall they’re building in Beijing-East, and ends up following a winding trail that may lead him nowhere, but will take him to the resort town of Yangshuo and in a seedy underbelly of Eurotrash and drugs here in among this sea of miniature mountains just north of Vietnam—where nothing is what it seems. Listen to Pt2 here and go here for Pt3.

What Goes Up Must Come Down is from a series of podcasts from Gabriel Boyer’s Apocryphal Histories of the Parasite.

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.

Uber, Antenna TV, & Radiation Evolution

January 12, 2021 in Podcast, Series, Three Things

Three Things Episode 6

This week, for 3 Things, we’ll be talking about Uber as a thing and whether it should be a thing at all, antenna TV as a thing as well as possible channels as of yet unaired, and whether or not perhaps our purpose on this planet is to help animals evolve through exposure to extreme radiation, thereby setting off the next great stage in evolution. As always, keep listening, and enjoying the curmudgeons as they visibly age while arguing the sticking points of their insanity.

Three Things is Gabriel Boyer, Malcolm Felder, & Adam Scotto. Every episode one of them brings up one topic that has been bothering them this week, and they discuss it. You can subscribe to this podcast here. That’s it!

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.

What Goes Up Must Come Down (Pt 2)

January 12, 2021 in Podcast, Apocryphal Histories, Series

Gabriel Boyer

A man can’t seem to leave his apartment—a manikin textbook at the end of time has a voice inside its head—a woman running towards a house in the snow is desperate to share some important information—a policeman in southern China is dealing with a strange foreigner in the Sober Up room—a CIA operative is giving a motivational speech about the end of America—a firm partner off to visit his ailing friend in an industrial city in northern China discovers his friend is more than just quaintly broken—a spokesman for a Chinese fast food franchise no longer believes he exists—and a pastor who gets some unlikely visitors in the middle of the night. These are the characters you will meet in this segment of Apocryphal Histories of the Parasite. Listen to Pt1 here and go here for Pt3.

What Goes Up Must Come Down is from a series of podcasts from Gabriel Boyer’s Apocryphal Histories of the Parasite.

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Luxury Prep, Dream Serials, & Grammy's

January 12, 2021 in Podcast, Series, Three Things

Three Things Episode 5

This week on 3 Things, we talk about luxury preppers preparing for the apocalypse with underground bunkers, our serialized dreams, about our houses rejecting us and nostalgia for New York being surpassed by the epic New York of our dreams, and Gabe’s on-going vampire dreams taking him to outer space, as well as the Grammy’s, what went wrong, what went wronger and what went wrongest.

Three Things is Gabriel Boyer, Malcolm Felder, & Adam Scotto. Every episode one of them brings up one topic that has been bothering them this week, and they discuss it. You can subscribe to this podcast here. That’s it!

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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.

White Stockings

January 12, 2021 in Podcast, Bedroom Theater, Series

The Bedroom Theater Dispatch

During the Chechen Wars, stories began to circulate about certain snipers—blonde-haired, blue-eyed, cold-blooded female snipers called beliye kolgotki by the Russians. The White Tights (or White Stockings) so named because they were said to only wear white, were rumored to be contract killers paid by the Chechens on a kill-by-kill basis. These assassins are/were said to be from small Baltic States with a grudge against Russia and are/were said to be members of a bi-athlon team, trained to cross miles and miles of rugged terrain then successfully fire a weapon and hit a target. The story got a boost when newspapers reported the capture of several female assassins—from the Baltics and from the Ukraine. However, other papers reported that the stories were absolute myth, attributing the creation of these mysterious female assassins to paranoia and convoluted historical facts.

At our most recent Bedroom Theater, audience members read poems written by Lina Vitkauskas inspired and penned to this mythical team of sharpshooters. The recording of these readings can be found below, and her book can be found here.

Bedroom Theater began when my roommate changed the light bulb in my bedroom and ended in a five-hour crying spree in the Nevada desert. There is no audience, only people performing for each other. For more on this, please see Welcome to Weltschmerz.

What Goes Up Must Come Down (Pt 3)

January 12, 2021 in Podcast, Apocryphal Histories, Series

Gabriel Boyer

In the third part of this 3 part history within the larger Apocryphal History of the Parasite, we find ourselves in the minds of a seedy Brit hiding out in Southern China for mysterious reasons, a woman in a basement apartment full of holes, a teenage girl who is also a long-bodied lifeform flowering from one end of the universe to the other, the founding member of ELF in an interrogation chamber, and the younger brother of a dead man. They’re all being torn apart by something. What is it? Listen to Pt1 here and go here for Pt2.

What Goes Up Must Come Down is from a series of podcasts from Gabriel Boyer’s Apocryphal Histories of the Parasite.

Millennials, Insomnia, & Faith Healers

January 12, 2021 in Podcast, Series, Three Things

Three Things Episode 4

This week on 3 Things, we talk about millennials, insomnia, and healers in strange places. We continue to whine in the tradition of the aging everywhere. Keep listening! And watch Jacob’s Ladder! We may no longer understand what’s happening in pop culture, but … watch Jacob’s Ladder! And keep listening.

Three Things is Gabriel Boyer, Malcolm Felder, & Adam Scotto. Every episode one of them brings up one topic that has been bothering them this week, and they discuss it. You can subscribe to this podcast here. That’s it!

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.

Best of the Music, Youtube, and Deaths of 2016

January 12, 2021 in Podcast, Series, Three Things

Three Things Episode 3

This week on 3 Things, we look at the top 3 musical acts of 2016, the great youtube enthusiasts, including MRE food critics, rat feces infested TV repairmen, and true macguivers with elaborate means for making fire, as well as the best deaths, because, if there’s one thing you can say about 2016, it was a year of death! For a complete playlist of videos and music discussed in this podcast go here. Also. Apologies for the pops and blips! We had a few technical issues this week.

Three Things is Gabriel Boyer, Malcolm Felder, & Adam Scotto. Every episode one of them brings up one topic that has been bothering them this week, and they discuss it. You can subscribe to this podcast here. That’s it!

Falling Boxes

January 12, 2021 in Product

Outside the Lines Music Summer Project

Falling Boxes is the product of a summer spent in a circle making sounds with drums and boom sticks and piano and keyboard and recorder and harmonica and meshing all these sounds together into a single larger hodge podge of sound. It is a collaboration of very different hands and a chaos only barely twisted into a variety of shapes. Mutable’s own Gabriel Boyer worked with the men and woman at Outside the Lines Studio to record covers from the distant past and the recent present, as well as extended freak-outs that sometimes went nowhere, but every once in a while went somewhere amazing! This is a sound collage of raw material and it is yet another unusual weird-o masterpiece, with all proceeds going to the Outside the Lines Studio!

Outside the Lines Studio is a day-program for developmentally disabled adults, in which persons create works of art that then go on sale in the gallery attached, and this sound project is no different. All proceeds will go back to the program itself. We here at Mutable are very proud to have had the privilege of working with the artists at Outside the Lines Studio and are excited for you to hear the wonder that was made there!

Music by the Outside the Lines Summer Music Project
Produced by Gabriel Boyer

Recorded at Third Life Studio

Cover image by Sylvia

Falling Boxes by The Outside the Lines Summer Music Project, released 11 December 2015 1. End of the Line 2. Fallen 3. Gabe's Final Piano Recording 4. Lean on Me 5. Sylvia 2 6. Stay with Me 7. Sylvia's Rough Beach 8. Sylvia 1 9. It's Been a Long Time Coming 10.

1. End of the Line
2. Fallen
3. Lean on Me
4. Sylvia 2
5. Stay with Me
6. Sylvia’s Rough Beach
7. Sylvia 1
8. It’s Been a Long Time Coming
9. Sounds in an Ecosystem
10. The Boxer
11. This Little Light of Mine
12. Sylvia 3
13. One
14. Wade in the Water
15. Sylvia 4
16. Round
17. Sylvia’s Piano 2
18. Week 3 Piano 1
19. Sylvia Singing Final

Digital album available to stream or download now!

Listen

Video: Body Positions I

January 12, 2021 in Podcast, Bedroom Theater, Series

The Bedroom Theater Dispatch

The performance showcased below was part of a larger evening called Women’s Inaugural Ball, an event dedicated to women artists and their work on the day of the Women’s March, and after the inauguration, January 20th, at Brickbottom Studios in Somerville. The performance artist, Jessica Lu, lives and works in Brighton, MA. Keep posted for more dispatches from the on-going Bedroom Theater happenings!

Bedroom Theater began when my roommate changed the light bulb in my bedroom and ended in a five-hour crying spree in the Nevada desert. There is no audience, only people performing for each other. For more on this, please see Welcome to Weltschmerz.