Mutable Sound was originally Mutable Press.
We once believed we were a company, and we should act like a company. Myself and Zach Katz founded Mutable Press, published a small book titled Seven Short Plays for the Bedroom that we had printed at Kinko’s, bound them ourselves using a saddle stitch on the floor of my bedroom at 180 Green Street—where the plays themselves had originally been performed—and declared ourselves a publishing house. We had discussed it in Brooklyn over eggs.
The initial aesthetic was all zine and zealotry, hapless wonder and high-end hilarity. Until I left for for China three years later, and then—three years after that—Mutable Press became Mutable Sound, this time ostensibly a record label with literary pretensions. And this time, my partner was Malcolm Felder, the mastermind behind that transformation. He and I had been making music together since before my face had lost its baby fat, and now we were going to act as the grand inquisitors of all things audible.
But that was many years ago now as well.
In the decade that followed our initial reboot, there have been economic downturns, whole lines of product destroyed in flood, myself once again run off to get married in the mountains of Sichuan, and in the process Mutable Sound evolved.
We are not a press. We are not a label. We are a collective.
We love manifestoes because we live by our own ever-changing manifesto. We make products that no one may ever listen to or read, but we make them. We built our own reality that exists in its own alternate timeline, always mutating to fit the ever-shifting contours of our lives, always careening toward the bottom but never quite there, of a people reaching for some new way in this failing universe we call the modern world, an island of culture unto itself.
We write our ideas and post them to this site, because the world is dying, and someone has to scream in the dark. Maybe everyone does.
We are a collective that is always growing into a larger collective—of musicians and thinkers, of publishers and practitioners. Growing slowly, but growing nonetheless. We see you. We acknowledge those the world of media has largely left behind, the misfits and ne’er-do-wells who lurk on the edge of total collapse. We have not forgotten the bohemian’s creed even as our bodies begin to fail us in this larger failure of a social experiment is the USA and China and everywhere between. In the larger ecological collapse is also everywhere and always now.
We create because that’s what we know, and that’s who we are.
As for me, I am Gabriel Boyer, editor-in-chief, author experimental fiction, founder of Bedroom Theater, musical collaborator with the aforementioned Felder, occasional expat, and self-described critic of everything.
Join us!