LA in the End Times

January 14, 2021 in Article, Letter from the Editor, Feature

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

January 13, 2021 in Podcast, Mutablesoundofthemonth, Feature

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!

Sophia Darby sings two songs at the Gentlemen Callers Spring Jam 2014

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: Angels

January 13, 2021 in sad

Song-A-Day

Here is the first of many magical moments we’ll be bringing you from the minds of John Manson and Dan Madri. Personally, I find John’s lyrical compositions and delivery somewhere between late Leonard Cohen and Scott Walker, and Dan’s bare bones accompaniment only accentuates the song’s stark beauty, making the above track, Angels, truly angelic.

"Here is the first of many magical moments we’ll be bringing you from the minds of John Manson and Dan Madri. Personally, I find John’s lyrical compositions and delivery somewhere between late Leonard Cohen and Scott Walker, and Dan’s bare bones accompaniment only accentuates the song’s stark beauty, making the above track, Angels, truly angelic."-Gabe Boyer (Mutable Sound )

John Manson and Dan Madri of The Gondoliers, became involved 4 years ago in a project called Fun-A-Day. (Or FAD.) And now John and Dan are continuing this tradition under the title Song-A-Day or SAD, and over the course of the coming months, we here at Mutable will be posting them regularly for your viewing and listening pleasure. Enjoy!

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Video: Eternal Family

January 13, 2021 in Isstillcools**t, Feature

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.

Join The Family™https://www.eternal.tv

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

January 13, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

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?

Big Babies, Groupthink, & Willpower

January 13, 2021 in Podcast, Series, Three Things

Three Things Episode 18

This week on Three Things we talk about adults who never grow up and still live a meaningful life, how no matter how smart we may seem on an individual scale, we’re not too bright in groups, and our struggles with self control.

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 find subscribe to this podcast here. That’s it!

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Myself from a Great Height (2)

January 13, 2021 in Podcast, Apocryphal Histories, Series

Gabriel Boyer

In this second installment in the story of post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh and one strung out man's effort to get to the bottom of Chinook Electricity and his own unraveling in the world, we witness buildings come alive as they implode, and come face to face with some very unhuman characters in an otherwise abandoned park down by the Point, and generally speaking things just get that much uglier as we continue to follow Jackson Cole down his ever-constricting hole. Enjoy!

Myself from a Great Height is from a series of podcasts from Gabriel Boyer’s Apocryphal Histories of the Parasite.

This Alienated Hero: A Review of Gabriel Chad Boyer's Welcome to Weltschmerz

January 13, 2021 in Press, Feature

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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Video: Gabriel Boyer performs w/ Talbot, Talbot, Talbot

January 13, 2021 in Podcast

ApesNest@Mutable

A few weeks ago, Mutable’s Gabriel Boyer read a story from his soon-to-be-finished Apocryphal Histories of the Parasite along with the musical mayhem of Talbot Talbot Talbot, not to be confused with their alter ego—Death Shepherd!

Gabe Boyer and Talbot, Talbot, Talbot - Live at The Ape's Nest - Industry Lab - October 28th, 2017

Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. Here’s where you can read more about him.

Cars, Apocalypse, & Internet Irony

January 13, 2021 in Podcast, Series, Three Things

Three Things Episode 17

This week on 3 Things we talk about the cars we have owned, or in Gabe’s case, about the cars we never in actual fact have owned, the apocalypses we would like to see, and whether or not the apocalypse is even happening, although it is definitely true that the internet is killing irony, and I don’t mean it’s killing it, but more like it’s dead. Which is the third thing we talk about.

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!

The Last Electrician

January 13, 2021 in Excerpt, Story, Series

Michael S. Judge

Mean density of rubber buckshot thuds against the left side of your chest, where cardiograph blossoms tangled with the disk-image star’s genomic stutter, dulled cartridge juddering newly nerveless across grooves worked into kerogen wax and compressed exoskeleton, the milk we’ve wrung from insect marrow,

eaten sunlight feathering the wet-gate star’s medical imagery with chordate quills of charcoal, vertebral preamps each potential for the signal it might route and amplify to some englobing flesh, a dendrite map dwindling with heat loss till it terminates into such gasping syntax as the glyph must break across to get metabolized,

if partially, erratically, momentum altered by the buildup of its own approaching wreckage, swaddled in fallout, cinders to turn the morning richly gray as carbon-heavy glass, optical track snarled up with the feedback of a cell-disruption star and peaking hard on all immunologic frequencies to matte down any EQ’s osseous smile again, the helpless seething grin of the dentition underneath what meat could lend it the appearance of a face you might interpret, still, even this late, render decidable and then pass fractious inaccurate verdict upon, unsure, as we must be, whether that constitutes a habit more tenacious even than the habit of survival or survival’s best remaining chance.

Neptune

January 13, 2021 in Isstillcools**t, Feature

In the Mutableye

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.

Studio Recordings / May, MCMXCVII by NEPTUNE, released 02 February 1999 1. Sponge Envy 2. Take It Out 3. Wife Beater 4. Jellyfish 5. When I'm Alone 6. Titanic 7. New 8. Am I Dead Yet? 9. Ink 10. Electricity Says Recorded in May of 1997 with Y.

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)

January 13, 2021 in Article, Feature

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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Roko's Basilisk, Workweek, & No Sand

January 13, 2021 in Podcast, Series, Three Things

Three Things Episode 16

For those of you who don’t know, Roko’s Basilisk is the premise that AI might develop to create virtual hells for those who didn’t help develop AI, and, speaking of hell, the 40-hour workweek is brutal—but worry not, because the Earth is running out of everything, including sand! As our three experts of nothing discuss these issues in their many infantile styles like overgrown babies as awlays. For the most part, they spend their time complaining about the future, the present, and the past, as usual.

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!

This is Not a Review: of Haints Stay

January 13, 2021 in Article, This is not a Review, Feature

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.

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

The Wes Letters: Brett, Letter 2, Out to Sea, A Black Hole

January 13, 2021 in Excerpt, Story, The Wes Letters, Series

Brett Zehner

Dear Wes.

Hi again.

I just turned 28. I wrote a song called 28 with a sweater and a cup of tea.

Still no fame (that I know of) which is sort of good because I cleared the ol’ 27 hump with little damage.

But in fact it’s not true. There has been plenty of damage. A junkyard full of it. I tend to fib because I have a bad memory. But here are some true concrete checkable facts. A list in fact that I keep to help me fend off memory gaps:

Egoes War

January 13, 2021 in Podcast, Mutablesoundofthemonth, Feature

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!

Nicole Mitchell - Egoes War from the album "Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds" available from FPE Records May 5, 2017

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!

January 13, 2021 in Story, Feature

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.

Stories, Road trips, & Magic lost

January 13, 2021 in Podcast, Series, Three Things

Three Things Episode 15

In this episode of 3 Things, Gabe, Mal, and Adam ponder stories and what makes them tick, their favorite most horrible road trips and losing the magic. Gabe has his own ideas of what makes a good story, Adam talks about wandering off in Alaska, and Malcolm consoles everyone about how great 90’s hip hop was, and maybe those days are done, but those were some days. There’s always spelunking.