There was a time when the free jazz was flowing and joyful, and Taylor Ho Bynum was part of that. The trumpeteer and composer went on to play with Anthony Braxton and record an array of influential albums, including The Middle Picture, Asphalt Flowers Forking Paths, Owl Jacket, and Navigation. A reviewer from Next commented that Bynum "deploys a litany of buzzes, whistles, drones, pinched fanfares and garrulous brass muttering in acrobatic arcs that twist and somersault." He has been the director of the Coast Jazz Orchestra at Dartmouth College since 2017.
Chapter 14: Alone Again, Naturally
in Podcast, Series, Weltschmerz
Gabe and Jill wonder about the Pacific Northwest, running out of money, stumbling into dinner parties, working at a buritto shack during hempfest, attempting to spoon, and ultimately saying their final goodbyes. As we approach the end of our Bedroom Theater tour of America, Gabe and Jill have only succeeded in completely breaking each other's spirit in this penultimate episode of Welcome to Weltschmerz, USA
You can find Chapters 1 - 13 here.
Paperback Book
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560 Pages
$16.00
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The Zulu and the Redcoat
Walker Zupp
1
Now it was 6:00 a.m. and everyone was tired from weeks of travelling to this benighted spot the locals called Isandlwana and Lorne Novak was wincing before a small parade of his fellow soldiers, including Captain Wallass, whose pocket-watch Lorne had pocketed the night before.
Their superior’s sjambok split the sun in two before whistling through the air and striking Lorne’s hairy spine.
“It didn’t work, sir!” Lorne assured him, referring to the pocket watch.
“Be quiet, Novak!” the Officer replied, raising his sjambok again, cutting the sun, and adding another red bar to Lorne’s skin.
“Twenty-second of January,” Captain Wallass noted inwardly, enjoying the sight of Lorne’s penalty, but also thinking about what the damaged Lorne had in stall for him…
After he delivered the last blow, the Officer replaced his pith helmet, mirroring the submarine-like protuberance that shadowed the campsite. It seemed to have burst though the dry landscape like a modern submarine through arctic ice, and the British soldiers were afraid of the odd dark tower.
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Video: Seduction 1
In this darkly profound exploration of desire and its malcontents, Manson’s signature spoken word is off-set by a disquiet of drum machine and synth. “Our growth is retarded by fantastic tools” We are bombarded by the fake and fakery of the erotic in the accompanying video as Manson & Madri croon their way through another cynical masterpiece. “Nothing’s more important than your feelings feeling okay.” Enjoy!
Seduction 1 is just one of a series of rock videos we have been posting from their collaboration, all of which can be found under the Song-A-Day link along the sidebar and you can find a selection of these songs on their album Secret Griefs here.
John Manson and Dan Madri of The Gondoliers, became involved some 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!
My Asinine Life: Unrequited Me as Still Life
in Article, My Asinine Life, Series
Gabriel Boyer
How do you summarize a life? How do you conclude yourself? Where are you when the boulders come bouncing down the incline? Are you at home and gazing at the glowing screen with some excitement? Are you out on a hike with your long-suffering spouse? Do you have your fingers in many pies at the moment? Have you given up on ever being anything like yourself?
Are you alone in your room and realizing that you are always going to be alone in your room from now on as you nurse your gout-ridden foot? What about that you didn’t end up here because you slid into a giant trap door in the sky or because of some other deception of the scene and the people in it but more because of the general complications of being, some of which very much have nothing to do with you and who you are, and some of which very much do—you ended up here because you just couldn’t help yourself—whatever that means in your specific case—or because you didn’t have the courage to do it differently—or maybe you did and that’s why. ‘Here’ herein meaning wherever you happen to be at the moment.
Could of been you didn’t think it through. Or you just got lonely. Or your mother got sick and someone had to take of her and it ended up being you. Or there came a point in your marriage when nothing made sense any more and now you’ve been divorced for five years and it still doesn’t make sense. This is where I am.
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Submergent 01
Mutable Sound of the Month
Jason Sanford experiments with technology to create new kinds and sorts of sounds with old tones and out of step algorithms, and Submergent is one of these sounds. It’s a sound like the hive has woken and it is hunting around the corner. It is a sound that presents only questions. Mr. Sanford has been bending the minds and metal of the music world for thirty years and he’s not finished twisting your soul into pretzels of itself using methodologies verging on the unacceptable. Enjoy!
Mutable Sound 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. If you have a track you would like us to hear, please feel free to send it on to mail@mutablesound.com along with credits and a brief description.
Video: Passion
“There was passion in my walk and it hurt in my feet.” With a jangle of tambourines and wailing guitar we are introduced to the many passions of Manson. His deep baritone voice speaks through the passion like a knife cutting through hot butter. “Passion dies like little bird except it doesn’t make a peep.” Enjoy!
Passion is just one of a series of rock videos we have been posting from their collaboration, all of which can be found under the Song-A-Day link along the sidebar and you can find a selection of these songs on their album Secret Griefs here.
John Manson and Dan Madri of The Gondoliers, became involved some 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!
The Declaration of Independence
Manifesto of the Month
[As we enter the home stretch of the 2024 electoral season, we here at Mutable wanted to pay tribute to a pivotal manifesto that is often overlooked in the history of political and artistic movements, the Declaration of Independence. Presented both as a set of grievances and a rationale for extreme action, it is also presenting a radical worldview wherein we are all equal and that governments exist to serve us rather than for us to exist to serve the whims of monarchs. You could argue that it’s the most successful manifesto. It’s movement is still going strong.]
*
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
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Businessman and Apple
Chapter 13: Anarchy for You and for Me
in Podcast, Series, Weltschmerz
Jill and Gabe find themselves on an anarchist compound in Saginaw, OR. Do they actually have lamas? Gabe reminisces about the future, when he will one day indeed live on this compound while working as a wildland firefighter while Jill is nowhere to be found. Beer is procured and an anarchist musical is performed. Later, that musical will be filmed. You can view the results of this filming here and the final shot of the Kenny Rogers Rock Opera (also performed in Saginaw) can be found here. Eventually, Gabe gets a haircut. Everything ends in tragedy.
You can find Chapters 1 - 12 here.
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8" x 5.25"
560 Pages
$16.00
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A Room That Is And Or Is Not Past Tense
Ben Segal
In the felt room is a softer spot in the soft of the whole. There is a slot there for the cards that poke out each morning and afternoon.
The morning card is Tongue Exercise
So the morning was for flexing and stretching, for folds.
Afternoon was another easy one, Sitting Still. It was a common card. A favorite.
At night the four people in the felt room slept side by side without touching.
In the morning the card said Diamond Mining and the four people who live in the felt room switched on their helmet lamps and entered the mine shaft. They carted diamonds to the softer spot in the soft whole of the felt room and pressed the diamonds to the slot, which was warm and wet, which one of them swore was pulsed with breath, which one of them swore tasted right. The afternoon card read Handcuff Game and that took the four of them to night.
The slot in the softer spot of the soft of the felt room is not mouth or vagina.
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Video: Fantasy
“Tell me your fantasy. Tell me your secret.” With Manson & Madri’s signature driving drums and shimmering guitar. “Tell me your dirty secret and I’ll tell you mine.” Manson’s voice lost in the storm of sound continues to coo to the listener his saccharine half-truths with the deadpan candor of grifter at last call. Enjoy!
Fantasy is just one of a series of rock videos we have been posting from their collaboration, all of which can be found under the Song-A-Day link along the sidebar and you can find a selection of these songs on their album Secret Griefs here.
John Manson and Dan Madri of The Gondoliers, became involved some 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!
Boston Bands in the 90's: Sebadoh
Lo-fi pioneer Sebadoh shown here with the original line-up of Lou Barlowe, Jason Lowenstein, and Eric Gaffney performing early renditions of such hits as Oven is My Friend, and As the World Dies, the Eyes of God Grow Bigger, and tossing out the occasional witty banter. Raw, intense, with a driving beat and minimalist, distorted guitar—beautiful tunes and beautiful times. “Every time I get up on stage, it’s like the spirit of punk rock inhabits my body.” Indeed.
Billy Ruane was a staple of the scene at one point, and he documented endless shows throughout the 90’s and beyond. These videos came out of that.
Chapter 12: I Sing a Slice of Life
in Podcast, Series, Weltschmerz
Jill has cooked a delicious kale dinner for Boyer and co in Silicon Valley. A performance at a loft in Oakland goes terribly and Jill goes missing. They journey north, to a pebbly beach, a pizza shack and its lost waitress, through dreams of John C. Lilly, into the redwoods and the future of 20 years from now, and ultimately, to Riddle, Oregon.
You can find Chapters 1 - 11 here.
Paperback Book
8" x 5.25"
560 Pages
$16.00
Now Available
AI Art, Camp, Kitsch, & the Singularity
In the Mutableye
AI art has proven both divisive and alluring, prompting Chomsky to describe AI and language learning models as, “plagiarism software because it doesn't create anything, but copies existing works of existing artists modifying them enough to escape copyright laws,” and, from Hayao Miyazaki: “I will never apply AI art to my work. The art form is an insult to life itself.” But there are those of us who can’t look away from these monstrosities, precisely because of their wrongness, their near-campiness and quasi-kitchiness.
It is in the ways that AI art fails that we are drawn to it. We chuckle knowingly at the oddly rendered hands even when we are unnerved by the humanity of the face we are looking at. We point out which actor this image was clearly based on, and how it’s just a little bit off, but we can’t stop looking at the sky behind.
As Susan Sontag says in Notes on ‘Camp’, camp sees everything in quotation marks. “It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman’” and this is exactly what AI art does to everything, but in both a more abstractified and specific way. It’s not Chris Pratt, it’s ‘Chris Pratt’. It’s not the Matrix. It’s ‘The Matrix’. It’s not a person, it’s a ‘person’. It takes units of culture and processes it into an ironic and alien counterpoint to the actual article, which is perhaps why Hayao Miyazaki sees it as an insult to life itself. Artifacts of human ingenuity are turned simulacra of themselves in a trick of computing mirrors that will always and forever render images that are somehow ‘off’, but it is precisely this offness that draws us to them, that turns them into units of camp, a kind of standardization of the so-bad-it’s-good aesthetic through the functioning of the attention transformer mechanism itself.
We here have Mutable have put together a collection of some of our favorites from the library of Abandoned Films and from TRGNY, as well as a few other examples indicative of trends in AI art as a whole.
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La Galerie Lente 1: Denis Colin
L’œuvre de Denis Colin se développe en gambade, discrètement. La simplicité, l’humilité de son économie vous poursuivent de leur charme, de leur humour enfoui. Le plus souvent crée en regard d’un lieu, pour un lieu, un évènement, elle s’y insère et s’en libère aussitôt.
J’ai proposé à Denis Colin des images de son travail tournant autour de la question de l’habiter.
All photographs © Philippe Robin. To see more of his work go here.
Video: Bardo Songs in Dharamshala
Mutable Sound of the Month
We here at Mutable have been venturing into the Far East and its vicinity for some time, and this most recent addition to our library of auditory delights comes from one of these forays. To Dharamshala and Cafe 129 where Mutable regular Gabriel Boyer was performing songs from various unreleased albums, and one or two you may have heard before but never like this. In this most intimate of concerts, at a venue perched high in the Himalayas and coming directly from the monastery he has been calling home for more than a year, Mr. Boyer sings songs of heartache in the Vietnam jungle and songs steeped in a wistfulness he wrote while living with the Tibetan monks of Northern India. Enjoy!
Mutable Sound 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. If you have a track you would like us to hear, please feel free to send it on to mail@mutablesound.com along with credits and a brief description.
Secret Griefs
in Product
American Darlings
These vignettes of the end times. Of a Mad Max dreamworld happening somewhere off stage left. A lush and endless pessimism. A wild and cynical manifesto of new-wave noir synth and heart-beat-like sonic violence. Like a haiku that forgot to count its syllables, a propaganda stripped of its propaganda and somewhere between a deadpan Jacques Brel and a don juan Daniel Johnston. Between late Leonard Cohen and mid-career Scott Walker. Between a bar stool confessional and a bar room anthem of these trying times, for the late-night crowd, of the American psyche on trial. Enjoy!
The songs presented here are part of a larger project of 30 songs recorded over 30 days by John Manson and Dan Madri. You can explore a library of videos from the full project here.
Lyrics written by John Manson
Music written by John Manson and Dan Madri
Performed by
John Manson: Lead Vocals
Dan Madri: Guitar, Bass, Piano, Synths, Percussion, and Drums
Engineered by Dan Madri
Produced by Dan Madri
Mastered by Scott Craggs
1. Angels
2. Crush
3. Brigade
4. Liberty
5. Scorch
6. Sirens
7. Surge
8. Chill
9. Maidens
10. Mist
11. Breeze 12. Acoustic 13. Charm 14. Rebellion 15. Dream 16. Fantasy 17. Majesty 18. Passion 19. Triumph
Digital album available to stream or download now!
Mosaic of Time: PRVSLY RCRDED
in Series, Mosaic of Time, Poetry, Story
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas (b.1973, she/they)
"1996" from PRVSLY RCRDED
All video poems included in the project PRVSLY RCRDED revolve around the notion that all life is “previously recorded” via inherited memory or biological encoding. The cycle of life (birth/death)—as well as the epigenetic scars inherited from ancestors’ fight-or-flight past—contribute to how we re-imagine/re-tell our narratives. Past poems (written) have now been deconstructed, re-arranged, and re-told as video poems. In the poem "1996", we hear the artist retell her journey to Lithuania as a 25-year-old graduate student—not a typical trip—as all "coincidences" in her journey seem to suggest she was being vetted as a diplomat or intelligence contact at the time. A trip to the borderland area of Kaliningrad, a conversation with the president, and some family secrets divulged resonate throughout the piece, causing the artist to ponder this suspicious series of events.
PRVSLY RCRDED will be an ongoing project, eventually becoming an online space / portal where I can re-purpose / re-present poems. As a 50-year-old poet re-inventing my work—also as a new immigrant from the US during a tumultuous time in all geopolitical spheres—I hope to offer a space for dialogue for those who have also experienced ancestral trauma.
Mosaic of Time is a monthly series that each month explores another cinepoem by author and artist, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas.
The whole body of the “Mosaic of Time” section will create a broader mosaic, over time, and ideally capture time as the world progresses or regresses—plunging into global events and out again.
Video: Majesty
“Yes, your majesty. We are your yes men. We will happily do your bidding. Your majesty.” With Madri’s driving drum & bass and its whining synth accompanying Manson’s sultry spoken word like a post-apocalyptic cabaret, like something diseased come upon the world, we are drawn into a kind of Mad Max dreamworld happening somewhere off stage left of this vignette of the end times, this twisted and cynical ode. Climb those majestic mountains, sirs!
Majesty is just one of a series of rock videos we have been posting from their collaboration, all of which can be found under the Song-A-Day link along the sidebar and you can find a selection of these songs on their album Secret Griefs here.
John Manson and Dan Madri of The Gondoliers, became involved some 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!
Ostrich Derby
Stephen Scott Whitaker
Ostrich Derby took place every year on the same day as the Kentucky Derby, starting approximately an hour after the winning horse made his/her triumphant cross over the finish line. Ostrich Derby took place on Mung’s Farm, about four and a half hours north of the Hayes farm and environs. Jeffery Mung and his wife Fay raised ostriches, two and a half dozen of them usually, sometimes as many as three dozen on a sizable chunk of land on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Mung had begun commercial ostrich farming for eggs, not the actual bird themselves, but the leather, the yolk, the albumin, the shell, the whole of the egg. Ostrich eggs retail somewhere in the high teens, sometimes twenties. There’s been rumor that Mung has branched out into farming the birds for meat, which he has yet to publicly confirm, or deny. All in all, it’s a labor of love, and Jeff Mung charges admission to local school kids to come to see the ostriches. Mr. Bill often reflects on the day he drove through the lazy Maryland countryside, almost identical to Virginia’s Eastern Shore in terms of vegetation, animal wildlife, etc., when he saw out the passenger’s window a large almost saurian looking bird running at high speeds round and round a fenced section of land. Mulch had casually remarked, “Oh yeah, ostriches,” and slowed so Mr. Bill could see the birds. Then even more casually Mulch remarked, “We’re coming here next weekend for the derby.” But Bill hadn’t heard that remark, he had been too busy admiring the stride of the birds, the large nine-foot body, the long sloping necks, and the head which reminded him of an old balding man. Bill then saw several other birds in orbit inside the black screened fence, high as an elephant’s eye. Bill, for a second, was transported somewhere else, a real honest to god mind-warp. Mr. Bill never forgot that moment, the odd, but quick black and white cartoon-like bird cutting, zipping across the long stretch of fenced-in green yard, backed by a row of large blocky shed-like things, which housed the dinosaur’s closest relative. For a moment Bill thought he was in another country. Where was the desert savanna, the palm trees, the Egyptian oasis? There was only Maryland humidity and hot summer sun.
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