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. 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 while adorned in condiments to an audience of youths for example. Then discovered soul music and formed the band Extra Play with Malcolm Felder, relocated to New York City where he curated the spoken word portion of the DUMBO Arts Festival in ’99. 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 finally 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 girl who broke up with him after the first week of their two-month two, 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 edited by Mr. Boyer. In the winter of that same year Mutable Press released How to Tell the Living from the Dead, Boyer’s first novel. In the course of the following year Mutable Press released four books, among which was Seven Nights in the Bedroom, a memoir of Bedroom Theater, also by Gabriel Boyer.
Then Mr. Boyer moved to China for a year, but instead of returning to Boston afterwards, he relocated to an anarchist commune just south of Eugene, OR, where he filmed an anarchist musical entitled 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 Gabriel’s failed 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 woodland 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 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 Buddhist Monastery in Northern India, The Dzongsar Institute, where he is the coordinator for the English Language Program. A post-apocalyptic noir, Devil, Everywhere I Look, has been released through Montag Press, and a follow-up novel, What Light Becomes Me, is set to be released in the near future.
