Above is a short film about Mutable author, William Levy (1939, Brooklyn, New York), and his notorious radio show, The Dr. Doowop show. Levy is an author, publisher and pioneer of independent erotic media, who currently lives in Amsterdam where he has the only doowop radio show in Europe. We have been honored to reprint his writing on Otto Muehl and Christian Loidl, and now we are honored to showcase the above documentary about the life and times of William Levy, and his radio persona Dr. Doowop. It’s a film about radical media, loneliness and eternal love, absurdity and close harmony music. ‘There’s nothing that makes you feel so alive as getting a death threat.’ Indeed.
August 22nd, 2010
Mutable Sound of the Month
Gabe Boyer & Malcolm Felder
5. 4. 3. 2. 1.
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For our first 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. Download it here, or listen below.
Gabriel Chad Boyer
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Mutable Sound is pleased to present a different unique musical experience every month. Each month we will bring you a different free download of an experimental one-off, by ourselves, or someone perhaps living in your very neighborhood! These are discoveries from the reel-to-reels and tascams of the garages and basements of the world, but also studio jobs make us feel things perhaps we wished we hadn’t, songs that stand on their own and songs that embody the spirit of mutability, songs we want you to cherish even though each is but a lonely single track.
As always, if you have a particular track you think would fit these criteria, just send a link to the song, credits, and a brief description to submissions@mutablesound.com
(Operation Garden Plot is a general U.S. Army and National Guard plan to respond to major domestic civil disturbances within the United States. The plan was developed in response to the civil disorders of the 1960s and is now under the control of the U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM). It provides Federal military and law enforcement assistance to local governments during times of major civil disturbances. Garden Plot was last activated (as Noble Eagle) to provide military assistance to civil authorities following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. The Pentagon also activated it to restore order during the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. Under Homeland Security restructuring, it has been suggested that similar models be followed. To read the current military position on Garden Plot, go here, to read Activist Father Frank Morales’ take on it, go here, and to read the original document, see below.)
The Cluetrain Manifesto Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Rick Levine
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1. Markets are conversations.
2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
The food hackers of Unicorn Precinct XIII Gabriel Chad Boyer
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First time I met Marc, he was going to cooking school. “Sometimes it takes a really destructive love affair. To realize this’s no way to spend your life. Writing code for hours and hours and hours and then? What do I get at the end of the day? A headache.” That was seven years ago now, and he has since gone on to become an underground food hacker, his own term.
Hacking food is the same principle as hacking computers, not in the illegal sense, but in the “dangerously innovative” sense, to hack into a food and recreate it from the inside out sort of thing. Taking something that was formerly inedible and somehow turning it into an edible thing for example. This is only the most recent among a long list of projects to have come through, and come out of the Unicorn Precinct, a house in San Francisco, notorious for its evocative creatural fare.
The Unicorn Precinct was founded in 1999, and is “home to family of anarchist artist musician spiritualist freak hacker chefs”. It started out as a hacker studio, then evolved into a recording facility, recording the likes of “Threesome at the Gas Station,” an easy-listening hip hop underground classic, produced by the Reverend Al and featuring the vocal stylings of K the I among others. The Unicorn Precinct has also served as a gallery of sorts, having on-going shows of local artists displayed on their walls, like “Pills” by Ellen Kraft, in which a place is set on the wall, the plate in the center of the place setting full of pills, but as far back as 2002 they were already becoming interested in food as a force for change. Below is the copy from their event, Ice Cream Armageddon:
“within a year we’ll all be in the army or in jail, we can either pay all of our bills *OR* spend all of our cash on SWEET DELICIOUS ICE CREAM for all of our friends! liquor + Mitchell’s ice cream cake + music + friends = one of many peak experiences we can all enjoy before the world breaks in two and we’re all forced to vote the machine line by robotic smallpox vaccine delivery agents.”
(Below is the first few pages of Ouspensky’s classic, The Fourth Way, in which he further expounds upon the teachings of his mentor, Gurdjieff, a man notorious for his extraordinarily limber disciples, and incapable, like Socrates, of taking notes on his own process. Gurdjieff has been accused of magic, and accused of being nothing more than a very demanding physical trainer with delusions of grandeur. Read on and decide for yourself.)
BEFORE I BEGIN TO EXPLAIN TO YOU in a general way what this system is about, I want particularly to impress on your minds that the most important ideas and principles of the system do not belong to me. This is chiefly what makes them valuable, because if they belonged to me they would be like all other theories invented by ordinary minds — they would give only a subjective view of things.
When I began to write A New Model of the Universe in 1907, I formulated to myself, as many other people have done before and since, that behind the surface of the life which we know lies something much bigger and more important. And I said to myself then that until we know more about what lies behind, all our knowledge of life and of ourselves is really negligible. I remember one conversation at that time, when I said, ‘If it were possible to accept as proven that consciousness (or, as I should call it now, intelligence) can manifest itself apart from the physical body, many other things could be proved. Only it cannot be taken as proved.’ I realized that manifestations of supernormal psychology such as thought transference, clairvoyance, the possibility of knowing the future, of looking back into the past, and so on, have not been proved. So I tried to find a method of studying these things, and worked on that line for several years, but the results were very elusive; and though several experiments were successful, it was almost impossible to repeat them.
Mr. Beaser: Is there any limit you can think of that you would not put in a magazine because you thought a child should not see or read about it? Mr. Gaines: My only limits are the bounds of good taste, what I consider good taste. Sen. Kefauver [alluding to the cover illustration for Crime SuspenStories #22 shown above]: This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste? Mr. Gaines: Yes, sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic…. Sen. Kefauver: This is the July one [Crime SuspenStories #23]. It seems to be a man with a woman in a boat and he is choking her to death with a crowbar. Is that in good taste? Mr. Gaines: I think so.
Mutable Sound is an online gallery for sound and word located in Chicago, IL. We are dedicated to publishing works in all genres, from the dense and inextricable to the light-hearted and absurd, and release albums that are experiments more than anything else, without being particularly experimental. We also record a weekly podcast and organize events of a more intimate nature. Contact us at mail@mutablesound.com.
Submissions
We’re always looking for submissions. Send your cd-rs and manuscripts to:
Mutable Sound
1690 Mississippi Ave
Eugene, OR 97403
