Percussionist Jon Mueller presents All Colors Present, a sound and visual meditation in collaboration with Tom Lecky. Bay Area improvisation duo Voicehandler opens.
All Colors Present
Why? Why do we obey and follow our compulsions? What do we seek as our horizon rolls away at a rate constant to our progress, in perpetual ceaseless motion, as we float forever forward in worldless, magnetized thrall? All Colors Present vivifies an inchoate force that has propelled Jon Mueller since he first engaged sound with action. At the center of these two bilaterally symmetrical pieces is a source, an essential substance with no influence, precedent, or subsequent approval — just a cellular impetus to Exist.
Jon Mueller’s singular performance idiom is an awe-inspiring display of elegant athleticism, preternatural focus, brute restraint, and ecstatic, monastic reverie. It requires and demands a state of inner quietude from witnesses. Here, two crisp beats repeat and reverberate—one, then two; two, then one—in a confluence of hand and stick, drumhead, and heartbeat. Yet, from this seemingly metronomic exercise blossoms every possible tint and hue of infinite spectral sound.
An apt reference point resides within the broad, decades-spanning catalog of Table of the Elements. Like Tony Conrad’s surging Outside the Dream Syndicate, the aural and conceptual headwinds are real, but the perceived affronts of provocation are not. These works are not endurance challenges, nor are they threadbare minimalist upholstery. They are not obstacles. They are invitations. Within their simplicity and formalism await a sympathetic repose, a comfort. These are gestures of generosity.
Why do we undertake these efforts? Mueller doesn’t overtly intend this to be his final work. Yet he recognizes an apotheosis of a lifelong path, a throughline that has dragged him from his origin to this moment. None of us may ever grasp the purpose of our innermost drive. We strain towards destinations of numinous obliteration.
What is the sense of it all? The answer may be another question. Have we at least honored ourselves and that most primal urge that beckons us to surge further and farther and beyond…?
"People have asked if there is a certain kind of meditation I practice to prepare for this kind of playing, and I say, "This. This is what I do.""
— Jon Mueller
Jon Mueller
Renowned percussionist and drummer Jon Mueller is celebrated for his uncommon technique, rigor, and virtuosity. Notable solo performances have taken place at the Guggenheim Museum, New Museum, Issue Project Room, SXSW, Big Ears Festival, Hopscotch Fest, and Witching Hour Festival. Beyond his solo work, Mueller has performed and recorded with Olivia Block, Who is the Witness?, Mind Over Mirrors, Volcano Choir, Collections of Colonies of Bees and Pele.
Tom Lecky
Tom Lecky has worked in photography, music (as Hallock Hill), the book arts, prose and poetry writing, and literary criticism. His creative work concentrates on memory, place, and environment, the work of the imagination, perception, and the intersections of abstraction and representation. He often interweaves appropriated texts and images with his own, evoking a conversation with the history of book design and illustration.
Voicehandler
Danishta Rivero: voice & electronics
Jacob Felix Heule: bass drum & electronics
Voicehandler plays intuitive, incantatory music grounded in the most primitive and somatic instruments -- the voice and percussion -- juxtaposed with contemporary, disembodied electronics. We situate ourselves in our physical and social environment through our music. Our improvisations are shaped by their setting and context.
The performance is loose and exploratory, at various times energetic and meditative. Rivero’s voice embraces noise, with the lines blurred between electronic processing and extended vocal techniques. Heule has a special interest in friction techniques, and embraces limited instrumentation - like a single drum and a single cymbal - as a commitment to exploring the depth of his instruments.
“…bizarre glossolalia, witch-like chattering, deliriously stuttering as an obsessed medium, as a distorted mouthpiece of Latina experiences. Heule… patters on predator paws or becomes very meek when the ghosts whisper as if with paranormal tape voices or increasingly only sizzling pure noise or switching off the human factor in waves of hum.”