Colin Winnette

Colin Winnette is from Denton, Texas. 

He is the author of Revelation (Mutable Sound), Animal Collection (Spork), Fondly (Atticus Books), Coyote (Les Figues), and Haints Stay (Two Dollar Radio). His novels have been translated into Italian and French. His latest novel, The Job of the Wasp, was published by Soft Skull Press in 2018.

He was the winner of Les Figues Press's NOS Book Contest, a runner-up for Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Award, and a finalist for Gulf Coast Magazine’s Donald Barthelme Prize for Short Prose.

His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Playboy, Lucky Peach, The Believer, BuzzFeed Books, and others. 

He's represented by Kevin O’Connor at Sheedy Literary.

Releases

Liszts

Your neighbor’s wife looks prettier than your own.

Follow the local custom when you visit a foreign place.

Elephant tusks cannot grow from out a dog’s mouth.

The participant’s perspectives are clouded while the bystander’s views are clear.

Pick the flower when it is ready to be picked.

When the tiger comes down from the mountain to the plains, it is bullied by the dogs.

It is impossible to change your basic characteristics.

One bitten by a snake, you are even frightened by a rope that resembles a snake.

When you go up to the mountain too often, you will eventually encounter the tiger.

Releases

OTL Summer Music Project

The Summer Music Project at OTL was a two-month exercise in which the artists at Outside the Lines Studio paired up with Mutable Sound’s own Gabriel Boyer to create songs and do their own renditions of favorites from the far and recent past. These sessions were recorded and then edited and mixed by Boyer to create the blessed chaos, Falling Boxes, available for download here. All proceeds go to Outside the Lines Gallery.

Releases

Paplib

Paplib’s music is like a known concept re-interpreted through the vocoder of God. He lives in a world of bleating stars, a vaporous universe of loops and abyssal darkness.

Inspired by bands such as Panda Bear and SJ Esau, Paplib consists of one Germain Caillet, formerly of the band Bellyache. He hails from Rennes, France. Working with pedals, repetitive and insistent, he creates what he calls, “grooves mélancoliques”. His songs have been featured in these compilations: Une Rentrée 2010 Volume 2, Collection Printemps/Été 2010, Objectif 2011, and Objectif 2011 Volume 2, all released by Les Inrockuptibles.

The verdict by Subjective e-zine: “Paplib : substance extraterrestre dont l’absorption a des effets bénéfiques variés selon le moment de la prise.” 

[i.e. Paplib: alien substance whose absorption has beneficial effects varied by time of dosing.]

Releases

Crank Sturgeon + Lineland

Crank Sturgeon: junk sound, faux pas, actionist ethos (act-shun pathos), fisch kopf psychedelia, non-art-performance-art, nothing too serious (and yet serious enough to keep doing it). Crank Sturgeon has been active in the wayward wandering peripheries of noise and performance art since 1992. Combining the foundations set forth by the Dadaists, Joseph Beuys, and Allan Kaprow, Crank has giddily blurred the lines of quasi-art lecture/presentation with a circus of high volume, irreverent pun, and punk sensibility. Whether just a solo voice and spontaneous poetry; or armed with an array of busted guitars, contact microphones, and the essential scrappy costume in tow, the show desires to connect sonic expression and visual distortion with athletics of the absurd: the cause and effect becoming simultaneously caustic and celebratory. Wriggling, combustible, sweaty, and delirious, in matters of fishnoise and man. And Lineland?

Shortly after moving to Queens in 1998, Malcolm Felder borrowed his roommate’s digital four-track and began recording whatever sounds he could make with some old synths and a memory-man pedal. After a while he got a little impatient with mini discs and decided to move the recordings to a computer. He employed his friend Adam to help him build a pc that they mounted inside of an old Dynavox record player. With this development, all the pieces were in place, and Lineland was born. He got the name from the one dimensional realm in the book, Flatland, by Edwin A. Abbott. He compiled a bunch of the songs onto a cd and gave copies to all his friends. Eventually, one of the cds got into the hands of Eric from Audio Dregs, who thought it would be a fine idea to make a proper release of it. In 2003, “Pavilion” was released. But where did their collaboration begin?

Crank, having retreated to Maine where he continues to experiment with sound and performance, and Malcolm having moved to Chicago where he continues to experiment with sound in a more intimate setting, the two decided to merge their particular aesthetics, Felder to take Crank’s dissonance and run it through his matrix of melody much as Charlie Chaplin was in that famous scene from Modern Times, to process the raw and elusive power that Sturgeon emits with the help of his various noisemakers and bring it to a new life, something sinuous and light perhaps, but a new thing is neither the one or the other, but beyond.

Releases

Box Kites

Box Kites are (from left to right)
Annie Heringer: Guitar, Vocals
Dalton Eljer: Guitar, Vocals
Maggie Peng: Bass, Vocals
Malcolm Felder: Drums, Keyboards, Vocals

Felder, Heringer and Eljer first joined forces tearing tickets at a movie theater in Brookline, Massachusetts. They began writing and playing music together a few years later while sharing a loft in Queens, New York. In 2008, Peng joined the group, and all four of them drove to Maine, piled what equipment they could into a small boat, and spent a few days recording on an island in Cobbosseecontee lake. The results became the bulk of their first album, Glitter Tracks.

Releases

The Mannerists

The players include Mr. Jeffrey Black, best known for his work on a musical called Free-Thinking Man as Commodity, on clarinet, Malcolm Felder of Lineland fame on drums, and Gabriel Boyer on vocals and piano. The album, “Live at the Pie House,” is to be released by Mutable Sound in 2009.

Releases

Gabe Boyer and The Thousand Eyes

This is a band that existed for a brief moment in time. The players included Gabriel Boyer, Hatim Belyamani, Malcolm Felder, Emily Hall, Annie Heringer, Adrianne Jorge, Jon Madden, Kevin Micka, Jon Natchez, Jason Sanford, Corey Tatarczuk, and Andy West. For more information concerning their project, The Textbook Tapes, go here.

Releases

Animal Hospital

We knew Kevin way back when we were both working at the Coolidge Corner Theater, and he had yet to pare down his musical aesthetic to himself alone, looping beats and letting loose the prettiest harmonies on electric guitar or other more mysterious bits of electrical equipment. He has played in several bands, including our own Extra Play as well as The Common Cold, before eventually becoming Animal Hospital.

Animal Hospital’s first CD (self-titled) was released through Mister Records in 2004. He has been playing in and around the Boston area, and stunned yours truly at a noise show in a loft in Allston last July, but he is softer than noise, more melancholy than abrasive. Mutable Sound put out his Good or Plenty, Streets + Avenues in January of 2009.

Since then, he has released two remarkable albums. Memory and more recently, Fatigue. For more about him and what he’s up to, you can check out his site.

Releases

Normal Feelings

Because so many of the albums released by Mutable Sound are concept albums by bands that existed solely to create the product, Normal Feelings was formed so as to bring this music to a wider audience. In short, Normal Feelings began as a tribute band to the music of the Thousand Eyes, the Liszts, and Betamale, but Normal Feelings has now evolved into a loose group of musicians working together to develop new sounds and new songs. Most recently, Normal Feelings and Mutable author Gabriel Chad Boyer have worked together to write, produce, and release their first album, No Place to Die, out now through Mutable Sound. 

People who are currently involved in Normal Feelings include, Gabriel Boyer, Malcolm Felder, Jason Allen, Phil Arezzi, Piotr Wereszczyński, Alex Yoffe, Dan Katayama, Paul Medrano, and Michael Gorka.

Releases

Beta Male

Beta Male is first and foremost a bunch of idiots in the woods. It is Adam Scotto, Gabriel Boyer, and Malcolm Felder. It is three days in the woods, complaining and occasionally recording. For those three days we were beta males, and the result is the album Battery Power.

Releases

Happiness Island

Happiness Island is an idea. It’s a place, but the sort of place you visited once in your dreams and then turned away from. Malcolm first got the idea from his forays into the children’s albums of yesteryear and spent over a year coaxing Gabriel to accept his particular aesthetic vision. Gabriel wrote Don’t Set Your Sights Too High, which was funny and brechtian, but also Boingo the Nihilist Bear, which went too far. Then, one Friday in December of 2000, Gabriel made his way down to New York, and the two of them discussed this project for the last time, and while listening to Malcolm’s extended collection, Gabriel finally began to understand. Malcolm put on his funniest voice and sang, ”People think that chipmunks got high voices, but they don’t,” and Gabriel burst into laughter.

The other musicians arrived the following day, and recording began. No one knew where to start. Then the various players had come down for this began improvising and Gabriel started improvising a song of his own. ”Happiness is wherever you are,” he sang. Their journey had begun.

Two days later, the recording finished, everyone returned to their former lives, and Malcolm began the arduous process of putting the pieces together to make this thing into something approached listenability. The songs had been recorded largely in chronological order, but there were pieces missing, and sounds and exposition to be added. It would be a year before his own journey was finished, and he brought it to Boston, to introduce A Journey to Happiness Island to persons might laugh and coo, or sputter in their confusion, but it existed all the same, and now years later perhaps now he can admit that his failure was a success all along.

Releases

‘A Journey to Happiness Island’ was recorded in a weekend. The product of years of conniving on the part of Malcolm Felder. Happiness Island isn’t Sappiness Island, anymore.