Gabriel Boyer has been wandering in and out of the sitting rooms of his friends and hopping back and forth between Asia and New England and points between for as long as there have been points. He has no sense of when to throw in the towel.
He began his performing career at the age of eighteen, singing Blood, Sweat and Tears to an audience of art school youths while adorned in nothing but condiments, then discovered soul music and formed the band Extra Play with Malcolm Felder, and although that band’s meteoric rise was followed by the inevitable collapse 6 months later in a Coop basement, it would spark a musical partnership that has lasted a lifetime.
After he failed to become a soul sensation, Boyer relocated to New York City where he curated the spoken word portion of the DUMBO Arts Festival in ’99 from out of a loading bay but mostly just wandered through the financial district while composing surrealist poetry at 3 AM.
He moved back to Boston to take over SWoON (Spoken Word or Other Night) from Zachary Katz, curating it monthly for a full year, during which time, he and Malcolm recorded their cult classic, A Journey to Happiness Island, one weekend in Greenpoint, and it was around this time that Boyer came up with the ingenious idea of Bedroom Theater, putting on plays in his bedroom on a weekly basis for more than a year before he took it on the road and to bedrooms across America in a 1971 VW minibus and with a young woman who broke up with him after the first week of their two-month tour, the final performance being at Burning Man, in the desert of Nevada and just prior to a psychedelia-infused nervous breakdown—a summer he memorialized in Welcome to Weltschmerz.
Somewhere in there, he recorded: Walking Stick (’01), The Textbook Tapes (’02), and Battery Power (’03).
In summer of ’03, Mutable Press (a company founded by Zachary Katz and Gabriel Boyer) released its first book, a collection of manifestoes compiled from a manifesto-writing class Boyer taught at the Berwick Research Institute, and in the winter of that same year, Mutable Press released How to Tell the Living from the Dead, Boyer’s first attempt at a novel, followed by Seven Nights in the Bedroom, a memoir of Bedroom Theater, also by Boyer, before officially ending itself over creative differences, after which Boyer moved to China for a year, returning stateside to join an anarchist commune just south of Eugene, OR, where he filmed the musical, Free-Thinking Man as Commodity.
After a summer working as a woodland firefighter and a brief stint working in a fish processing plant in the Bering Strait, he and Malcolm Felder recorded a radioplay, Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies, in the spring of ’08 at Shady Pines Studios, and in the same week, recorded, Live at the Pie House, with the Eugene Community choir, after which the two of them drove to Chicago with Jeff Black, and Mutable Sound was born.
That winter they released an album they had recorded in Kalamazoo, as the Liszts, Big Trouble in Little China, a bilingual pop album, as well as a 1,000 page tome of Boyer’s many failed literary attempts, aptly titled A Survey of My Failures this Far.
Boyer spent the winter of the economic collapse living off of Mac & Cheese while reading the Lankavatara Sutra, having spent all his earnings from Alaska on his massive tome, and decided to return to Oregon, where he continued to spend summers as a wildland firefighter even as he wintered as a caregiver for developmentally-disabled adults, all the while running Mutable Sound from the confines of his shack in the rural ghetto of Glenwood, until he again returned to China on a whim.
He would end up living in China for the better part of three years, get married in the mountains of Sichuan, and produce an album about the experience, entitled, No Place to Die, ultimately returning to his hometown of Boston with his new wife, where he mostly worked in ESL even as he was volunteering with Outside the Lines Studios to produce Falling Boxes.
He has since divorced (and of course recorded an album about it, entitled, Different Directions), spent COVID living in Vietnam, returned to the US to teach high school, then back to Vietnam, and now lives at a Tibetan monastic college in Northern India, The Dzongsar Institute, where he is the coordinator for the Language Program. A post-apocalyptic noir, Devil, Everywhere I Look, the first in a four-part series of books, has been released through Montag Press, and now the second, What Light Becomes Me, is coming out, and so Boyer is touring the US through the month of January, 2025, reading science fiction and performing sad sac country classics.
For more information on upcoming show dates, to express interest in teaching ESL to Tibetan monks in North India, or just because, feel free to write him at: boyer.gabriel.c@gmail.com
