Podcast
In this installment of Boyer’s audio memoir we find Gabe and Jill back in Boston and waiting on the van so that they can bring theater to bedrooms across America in a 1971 VW minibus, as well as hoping to get Zach to perhaps, possibly buy a camera to document this event. But will Jill and Gabe ever even get on the road? Featuring the occasional flashback.
In this second installment of Boyer’s audio memoir of the summer he spent traveling the country, bringing theater to ‘bedrooms across America’ in a 1971 VW minibus, we travel to Brooklyn and the other burroughs, Boyer tries Yohimbe, and an author of comedic drama doubles as a private dick, but what happens when our heroes become lost on the backroads of NYC at 2 something in the AM? Where is it all going? Or is it all just going back?
To hear Chapter 1, Last Week’s Broadcast, go here.
This month, we have chosen a track off Bode Radio’s most recent album, Onosea. We here at Mutable have been watching Bode Radio’s progression with keen interest over the years. Alex Yoffe, the man behind the music, is deeply involved in Gamelan, and was trained in composition, and Bode Radio emerges from all of these interests. Recorded in Chicago, Boston, and Java between 2015 and 2017. It’s a very dynamic album that takes the listener to many places, sometimes more loping and trancelike and sometimes more frenetic, but always masterfully constructed, with layer upon layer of nuance. Enjoy!
Onosea by Bode Radio, released 13 December 2017 1. Fluttertounged 2. Dance 3. North End of Kyoto 4. Dusk at Reikai 5. Lo Sparks 6. BirchStab//Masquerade 7. Slipping, Sleeping 8. Event Horizon 9. Sphere 10. Lullaby Recorded 2015-2017 Java, Indonesia Boston, MA
In this first installment of Boyer’s audio memoir of the summer he spent traveling the country, bringing theater to ‘bedrooms across America’ in a 1971 VW minibus with a woman who’d broken up with him after the first week. In this first chapter learn how Bedroom Theater came to be, and the odd set of circumstances that led to this most useless of people somehow finding himself on the road and touring the country in the Summer of 2003.
Bedroom Theater began with a changed lightbulb and ended in a desert in Nevada. The audio book presented here presents the journey it took to bedrooms across America in the 1970 VW minibus pictured above, a journey of two young people, and a journey through the summer of 2003, and its many back alleys and exotic half-stories. This is the abridged audio book version of Welcome to Weltschmerz, unfolding biweekly on the Mutable site. Start at the bottom and work your way up to follow Jill and Gabe through the bedrooms of the past. Enjoy!
For this Mutable Sound of the month, Malcolm and I thought we’d present you with a song we recorded one fateful night many years ago. I will never forget my irritation when Malcolm nudged me to come out to the car to record another pop masterpiece. I remember very distinctly thinking to myself, Oh. God. Do we have to record every time we hang out?
The idea was to record an inappropriate holiday country song using an array of instruments from Malcolm’s stash, like his chinese accordian and autoharp, in Malcolm’s grandfather’s old Chevy Caprice Classic. What we ended up with was a new year’s song about an absentee dad.
Then Malcolm began recording, on a stereo microphone attached to a simple cassette. After each track had been recorded, he would play it back on the car stereo, and we would record over it on a new tape, then put that tape in the car stereo, and record yet again, until our final track was this bizarre blown-out mush. Then Malcolm performed his usual production magic, and voila. Here it is. Another song I love.
Gabriel Chad Boyer
Saba Lou, daughter of the infamous King Khan, released an album not that long ago that caught the attention of us over at Mutable Sound. Garage rock at its finest with lyrics that are pure poetry. The music has a classic sound without being kitschy, and a voice that is equally comfortable crooning, growling, or sliding into a deadpan drawl. Occasionally, the song-writing sounds a little derivative of the 60’s garage rock from which she takes her inspiration—like on the chorus of Dirty Blonde—but at its best it transcends its psychedelic roots to straddle the worlds of Black Mountain with its epic sound and a more pared down singer-songwriter sound. Saba Lou likes to play with extremes in her songwriting in general. She has that kind of elastic voice that can play it either way, and this is also where she shines, sliding from sweetness to gritty and back. It is a captivating, even hypnotic back-and-forth, and expertly rendered on Novum Ovum. “Darling, you are the weather.” Novum Ovum is Saba Lou’s second album, and at 19, she’s primed to explode on the world stage.
Limited pressing on "Bone" colored vinyl Includes unlimited streaming of Novum Ovum via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. Purchasable with gift card Send as Gift Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
There are many versions of the fall of Pittsburgh, and there are many versions of Jackson Cole. But in this particular version of events, Mr. Cole is a drug addict and a vagrant, and he may even have finally found the thread that ties all this terror together. Pittsburgh's collapsed in the civil war America lost, and a down-and-out detective strung out on a very potent hallucinogenic narcotic is going to find the answers in this first part of a three-parted history within the larger Apocalyptic Histories of the Parasite.
On a quiet summer evening some several months ago, I found myself sitting out on the grass beside a farm in New Hampshire, while on a haybed left parked just by the sheep pen a pair of musicians were in the middle of the most dreamy set of folk-pop. Later, I was to learn the singer-songwriter who stood with her hair perched on top of her head was Sophia Darby. Her voice has a similar lilting confessional style as Cat Power—the same casual almost lullaby quality that I enjoyed so much on early Cat Power masterpieces, such as Moon Pix and Covers—Sophia Darby has the power though to grab your attention and keep it there. I hope you enjoy this other candid video. Someone please produce her album!
Sophia Darby sings two songs at the Gentlemen Callers Spring Jam 2014
This week on Three Things we talk about adults who never grow up and still live a meaningful life, how no matter how smart we may seem on an individual scale, we’re not too bright in groups, and our struggles with self control.
In this second installment in the story of post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh and one strung out man's effort to get to the bottom of Chinook Electricity and his own unraveling in the world, we witness buildings come alive as they implode, and come face to face with some very unhuman characters in an otherwise abandoned park down by the Point, and generally speaking things just get that much uglier as we continue to follow Jackson Cole down his ever-constricting hole. Enjoy!
A few weeks ago, Mutable’s Gabriel Boyer read a story from his soon-to-be-finished Apocryphal Histories of the Parasite along with the musical mayhem of Talbot Talbot Talbot, not to be confused with their alter ego—Death Shepherd!
Gabe Boyer and Talbot, Talbot, Talbot - Live at The Ape's Nest - Industry Lab - October 28th, 2017
This week on 3 Things we talk about the cars we have owned, or in Gabe’s case, about the cars we never in actual fact have owned, the apocalypses we would like to see, and whether or not the apocalypse is even happening, although it is definitely true that the internet is killing irony, and I don’t mean it’s killing it, but more like it’s dead. Which is the third thing we talk about.
For those of you who don’t know, Roko’s Basilisk is the premise that AI might develop to create virtual hells for those who didn’t help develop AI, and, speaking of hell, the 40-hour workweek is brutal—but worry not, because the Earth is running out of everything, including sand! As our three experts of nothing discuss these issues in their many infantile styles like overgrown babies as awlays. For the most part, they spend their time complaining about the future, the present, and the past, as usual.
This Afrofuturist freak-out by Nicole Mitchell from Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds—available May 5th from Chicago-based FPE Records—blurs the edges between philosophy and mysticism, modern art and radical political critique. Inspired by the brilliant Afrofuturist author Octavia Butler, Nicole Mitchell dares to use science fiction to pose the question, “What would a world look like that is truly egalitarian, with advanced technology that is in tune with nature?” Enjoy!
Nicole Mitchell - Egoes War from the album "Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds" available from FPE Records May 5, 2017
In this episode of 3 Things, Gabe, Mal, and Adam ponder stories and what makes them tick, their favorite most horrible road trips and losing the magic. Gabe has his own ideas of what makes a good story, Adam talks about wandering off in Alaska, and Malcolm consoles everyone about how great 90’s hip hop was, and maybe those days are done, but those were some days. There’s always spelunking.
Malcolm talks about food trends, Gabe talks about his troubled history with food, and Adam talks about Roger Ebert’s cookbook this week on 3 Things. Is food an artform? What is “skin egg”? Did you know Roger Ebert used to bring a rice cooker with him to film festivals and cook up his favorite dishes in the pot while watching foreign dramas before his many unfortunate surgeries?
This week on 3 Things we talk about learning to be a beast to better learn how to be a human, whether or not we have as a society given up on the ideas and principles of the Enlightenment, and whether bartering is a viable economic option. Does smelling poop lead to better vision? Can our world continue to exist on a diet of fake news and geopolitical posturing? Would you barter poetry for a nose-hair hairdo? These are just some of the questions we grappled with this week.
As we end this installment of Jackson Cole's face-off with the beyond, the obfuscuting darkness has only become more infuriatingly bright. How are we to judge this lost junkie? Searching for answers to questions he hasn't thought to ask? Stumbling into rooms without any clear dimension. Walking down streets invaded by the cannibalists among us. Where will he end up? And why did he have to end up there?
The show below, pasted between two nights of Bedroom Theater, features avant punk musical stylings, a monologue of a teenage girl flowering as a multi-dimensional lifeform in the abyss, candid unplugged versions of classic songs from Mutable’s Glitter Tracks [by the Box Kites] and No Place to Die [by Normal Feelings], as well as a few brand-new numbers, a four-person retelling of The Nightingale by Hans Christian Anderson, and a recorded round table discussion of contemporary politics. Enjoy!
