OF LANGUAGE & GRAMMAR Jon Mueller
Sep 10, 2008
Looking at the virtuoso's 2008 Output (Thus Far).
BY CHRISTIAN KIEFER
Perhaps the limitations of human language are of necessity. After all, we can likely all agree that the word definitions afforded up by dictionaries are at best approximations of meaning. Words denote and connote; they are afforded a particular meaning in one part of the country and are meaningless somewhere else. They jumble together, trading allegiances and jumping borders and in doing so both connotation and denotation change. Such are the effects of culture and usage that language is a living, breathing organism that changes and evolves at the behest of its practitioners. Pinpointing "meaning" amidst the changing landscape of linguistic mutation becomes a fool's game.
Of course, music journalists necessarily need to affix linguistic definition to their subject matter and in doing so they play this fool's game. Let's look at the word "percussionist" for example: slightly more adventurous than the word "drummer," but perhaps not so different to the layperson. Both percussionists and drummers strike objects together-a stick against a drumhead, the beads inside a rattle, a mallet against a marimba key-and that action tends to describe them both. The sonic event that occurs generally begins with a sharp sense of attack and then a varying level of decay. Of course this is not always the case, as a good percussion can coax all manner of sounds from his or her equipment, but one gets the point. Person with sticks and mallets and shakers is a drummer or percussionist of some kind; person with pick and tight leather pants is a guitarist.
It sounds simple, but then again such human pursuits as language and music are rarely as simple as they seem upon a casual glance. There are musics that push the limit of possibility, from the Zen-like non-action of John Cage to the onslaught of John Zorn's Naked City. These are musicians who eschew the standard labels, not merely asking for redefinition but perhaps for deconstruction of the language itself.
Here's where Jon Mueller enters. Most journalists, and perhaps even he himself, would call Mueller a percussionist, but the sound sizzling from Topography (Xeric/Crouton), his recent collaboration with Jason Kahn (Xeric/Crouton), implies otherwise. The album's five tracks-each between eight and ten minutes in length-sound little like any definition of "percussion" or "drumming" we could even begin to understand, despite the fact that both Mueller and Kahn are listed as percussionists in the credits. But then again, we've already covered the concept that language changes. A fool's game. And yet the long, repeating drones of static offered us on Topography seem to thwart even these warnings.
So Mueller is pushing the boundaries of percussion. So he's redefining the genre (if it is a genre). So he's redefining the word. Who cares, you say. Why does it matter, you say. I'll tell you why it matters: Because it does. Language moves and music moves and Mueller is at the forefront of at least one of those two movements and perhaps is at the forefront of both. Topography lists Mueller as performing "percussion, cassettes" and Kahn "percussion, analog synthesizer," although who and what is making which sound is impossible to ascertain. What can be ascertained is this: Mueller and Kahn have made a drone album, but unlike the long-form drones of Skullflower or Pelt or other droners, this one contains no recognizable pitched sounds at all (save some sub-sub-subsonic noise). Instead, the two stack static and endless drum rolls and slowly sifting rumbles like a nightmare circus snare drummer who has become stuck endlessly waiting for the man to come blasting out of the cannon. As anyone who has listened to Topography will tell you: The cannon will never fire.
Topography is indicative of one of Mueller's major concerns these days: working with long forms. In his previous instrumental band, Milwaukee's instrumental math rockers Pele, Mueller was all about precision and instrumental beauty, and while there's still some of that happening with his instrumental outfit Collections of Colonies of Bees, for the most part Mueller has spun heavily into the avant-garde. And if "heavily" means nothing these days, at least the release schedule for this year is heavy enough: 2008 has seen (so far) three releases with Collections of Colonies of Bees, three solo releases, two collaborations, some session work, and finally a stint on Rhys Chatham's triple CD "Guitar Trio Is My Life!." Christ. Each one works with a kind of grammar of sound (if you'll permit the askance reference to Coleman). With Topography Mueller (and indeed Kahn) has moved the period out of the sentence and has dispensed with the comma entirely. Semi-colons, then? Not on your life. What one is left with is the Molly Bloom soliloquy from Ulysses. But wait! Mueller has dispensed with the nouns and verbs as well. What's left then? Prepositions? Articles? A few random adverbs and conjunctions?
Lest the grammarian in you despair, let me inform you in as calm and soothing a tone as possible that Mueller has not thrown out the verbs and nouns, but has merely removed them to different projects. If Topography is akin to a grammar-less sentence, then his recent solo album Metals (Table of the Elements) is where one will find the missing verbs. In fact, Metals is all verbs, a heavy metal album performed on a solo drum set (yes you read that correctly) that will very likely elicit two reactions. The first: "What the fuck?" The second, and perhaps more importantly: "Why didn't I think of that?" Indeed.
Mueller begins with a tone that reminds of his noun- and verb-less work on Topography but here it's a trick-like a long Faulkner sentence leading ultimately to a huge list of action verbs in 48 point type as the album explodes into speed metal (or is it black metal) drumming that is so regular, mechanistic, and intense that it is itself a kind of meditation. Verb. Verb verb verb! Verb! Verb! And, lest you missed the use of the word, this is drumming and is recognizable as such. But metal? Don't we need churning chunky guitars and doom-laded vocals? Perhaps not, particularly if we look at what Table of the Elements labelmate Arnold Dreyblatt has done much the same pummeling repetition only with double bass, and contemporary drone metallurgists Sunn O))), who at times (many times actually) seem to eschew rhythm altogether.
In most ways, Metals is a showcase for Mueller's skills as a drummer as much as it is a test of his (and the listener's) endurance. It is not particularly easy listening, even with drumming as adept and skillful as this. There are neither frills nor fills on this album. There's no flash. There is nothing to suggest any kind of dexterous workout. Instead, Mueller's bent here is to force the listener to really grapple with sonic moments, discovering within the near-endless repetition a series of counter rhythms and sonic overtones that demand the listeners' attention while simultaneously refusing to anything to really hang onto. It is, in essence, a heavy metal metronome. This experience manages to align Metals not only with the drone metal acts cited above, but also with noise percussionist Z'ev, an artist who has continued to challenge our understanding of percussion, sound, and the parameters of "noise" as music.
Metals and Topography are fine places to start because in some ways they stake out the poles of Mueller's solo work, although admittedly such poles are bent and twisted and will likely blow away given the next blast of sound. They speak to the verb-heavy and to the fragmented non-sentence run-ons that make up some of what Mueller works with. But then there is another side to Mueller that at some level takes up the themes of Topography and presents its concerns in micro-focus, as if dispensing with all words but "a" and "the" and perhaps "and" and then writing a novel with only those.
Take, for example, Nodes and Anti-Nodes (Crouton), a DVD+ audio track project that Mueller has released with found sound, field recorder, and percussionist (there's that word again) Jeph Jerman. Jerman's discography is about as lengthy as a Tolstoi novel, but unless you are deeply ensconced in the territory of found sound, field recordings, and manipulated moments it is unlikely he's crossed your radar. Consider the descriptions of a random sample of CD-R releases: "contact mic recordings of insect life," "collage of field recordings of found metal," "turntables affixed with pendulums and loaded with stones and bones in concert with cactus and other detritus." One doesn't know whether to run screaming or to order everything at once. I choose the second option.
Jerman is a percussionist in that he's more interested in sound events than melody so his work is set on a trajectory that fits well with Mueller's and indeed Nodes and Anti-Nodes is fascinating viewing, but certainly not for everyone. What we have here are close-ups of percussion events: rattle snares on a drum head, clinking bones circulating on a turntable, etc. These are intercut with what one presumes to be the "anti-nodes" of the title: shifting light through leaves, mostly. In contrast with the nodes of sound, these anti-nodes are silent and that contrast is indeed shocking and somewhat unsettling, particularly since the cuts are abrupt and sometimes very far apart so that the silence of the shifting shadow play suddenly becomes the roar of the snares. It's essentially an ambient film that doesn't really want you to easily accept its images and sounds.
Jerman and Mueller clearly have a sense of purpose here: to document (perhaps a bit obsessively) the sources of sound and of silence and to show the kinds of visual and auditory patterns that arise from each. It's great in many ways, but it takes a bit of patience (or a bongload of weed) to get through. And for those with even more patience there's an extra audio file on the disc in case the viewer would rather become listener and experience the sounds of Nodes and Anti-Nodes sans the images, a surprisingly fun listen for those of us who tilt toward field recording and sound-as-experience.
But then the micro-focus and stacked non-chordal drones and heavy metal drumming hardly represents all that Mueller does or is. As if "percussionist" and/or "drummer"-even as redefined and deconstructed-were insufficient, Mueller appears as guitarist on two single-sided clear vinyl releases. The first, Six Guitars (Table of the Elements), appears under the banner of his instrumental group Collections of Colonies of Bees, the only link that currently seems to exist between Mueller's previous work with Pele and his current interest in the avant-garde.
Six Guitars appears to be exactly what it advertises: the band has put down their various instruments and picked up guitars, both electric and acoustic. What occurs sonically is akin to a lazy Sunday rendition of mid-1960s minimalism, an exploration of the ground that Pelt has fruitfully tilled for many years. Like some of Mueller's other fascinations, then, Six Guitars is something of a drone piece. The single-side begins and ends with a long note (perhaps played via Ebow), and then develops in a combination of electric and acoustic guitar strummed, picked, and finger-styled into a kind of circling pattern that, as with classical minimalism, changes slowly over time.
The second vinyl-like Six Guitars single-sided and clear with an etching on the flip side-is less lazy summer and more industrial in feel. Appearing under Mueller's name, Strung (Table of the Elements) again features Mueller's guitar work, this time in a solo context (with ample overdubbing). This time, Mueller begins with a heavily distorted and compressed guitar motif that is more rhythmic than musical and which serves to anchor the sonic landscape in a perceived 4/4 rhythm. Behind that rhythmic moment appear a series of drones that rise and disappear until the piece's midpoint, wherein the rhythm disappears entirely and the listener is met with bleeps and blips that sound more electronic than guitar-based. The rhythmic motif reenters toward the end, bringing the piece around to the start again.
Strung is not the most successful of Mueller's recent releases, but given the context of his interests it makes sense. In some ways, one can imagine Strung to be the guitar tracks missing from his Metals album and the maniacal sense of repetition, continuing interest in drones and static, and attention to sonic detail are all apparent on this ½ album. Nonetheless, the central motif that anchors the record is not quite as interesting as Mueller seems to find it and even if we try to grapple with the notion that it is purposefully and willfully NOT interesting-a clear move, in other words, towards postmodernism-such a conceptual reading still does not make it any more aurally palatable.
On the other hand, much of what makes Mueller's music interesting is studying it as accumulation and as such it is across multiple works that Mueller's project really begins to reveal itself. Compare, for example, the recent Collections of Colonies of Bees release Birds, which assumedly sees Mueller sitting back on the drum stool (although who really knows). Much like his late 1990s work in Pele, Bees takes up the instrumental rock flag and although the title makes little sense in relation to the work-there's nothing here that evokes birds of any kind at least to this listener-the album on the whole is quite beautiful, in large part because it lacks any sense of showing off. At no point on Birds will the listener notice an individual player, nor will they note any specific moment of complexity or of musical dexterity. Instead, Birds offers a band completely of itself, understanding where it is going and what it is doing and acting as a single entity. If we're still talking grammar, then this is at last where we encounter Mueller grappling with full sentences and they are beautiful sentences indeed: neither the basics of Hemingway nor the thorny oak of Faulkner, but something in between.
A similar vibe exists on Rhys Chatham's recent triple CD "Guitar Trio Is My Life!," (Table of the Elements) a release that features a rotating cast of musicians (amongst them Alan Licht, Thurston Moore, and Tony Conrad) performing Chatham's seminal work "Guitar Trio," a piece that bridged the gap between avant-garde/new music and New York's brief, shining no wave scene. Mueller drums on the Milwaukee recording in an ensemble that also includes US Maple's Todd Rittman, Collection of Colonies of Bees' Chris Rosenau, and Joan of Arc's Ben Vida.
It's likely that Mueller may have learned a thing or two about the power of endless repetition from Chatham's piece-essentially a rumination on a 4/4 E chord in two parts. The first asks the drummer to keep time on the high hat. The second allows the drummer to utilize the entire kit. What Mueller does with this half (and we don't have the first half of the Milwaukee set on the CD) is push that 4/4 rhythm into a malleable collection of sonic elements that is rockist without being overly so. Here, pressed up against the churning of six guitarists playing the same chord (seven if we include the bassist), we finally get to hear Mueller stretch out and really play-flipping the rhythm and punctuating a kind of staccato breakdown with his kick so that the drum sounds approach math rock. The mathy approach serves to press the force and depth of Chatham's piece and offers listeners a kind of mooring point amidst the relatively sameness of the droning chord.
Perhaps that's what most important to note about Mueller's music throughout these recent releases: never is there a sense of trying to prove himself as a drummer, as a percussionist, or even as an avant-garde/free improv player. Even if our dictionaries fail us and the definitions of "drummer" and "percussionist" and "guitarist" are rendered meaningless by Mueller's shifting musical usages, Mueller himself continues to do what he does best: which apparently means, simply, that he does whatever he wants, pressing up against musical-or grammatical-conventions and seeing what can be pulled out and what cannot. The accumulated releases of 2008 (thus far) allow us to view what Mueller does in ways that are much closer to the notion of Ornette Coleman's "sound grammar" than Coleman himself has ever been, not in terms of the music perhaps but in terms of concept.
And concept, with Mueller, is often where it is at. With a lesser creative talent, such a conceit would likely fall short, but with Mueller the conceptual framework of his ongoing projects only serves to deepen the intellectual possibilities inherent within.
[Mueller on the web: JonMueller.net; photo by Kat Berger]
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