Letter from the Editor

Mutable used to be Mutable Sound and before that Mutable Press.

At first, we 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.

And throughout it all, I have occasionally played the part of editor-in-chief, and the articles below are what came of that.