Death Blues

Been meaning to post this for a few weeks now, but well, time flies while you're doing stupid shit, which is pretty much Jon Mueller's point:

How much time is left? Do we know? Does our plan know? What happens when we thoroughly hold and understand that our lives are finite? How does this understanding of our end shape our present? And how do we become more ‘present?’ Because each moment is an opportunity and a decision. (emphasis mine)

I can tell you that being diagnosed with a chronic disease–I have MS–does tend to shape your focus a little bit about What's Really Important, as does going through the stages of hepatic and then pancreatic cancer with your mother (miraculously unrelated) over the course of eight years, as does having a crazy chick fail to kill your younger brother simply because she neglected to chamber the first round in her .380. But even with all of this existential focussing going on, I can still drift off into complacency and time wasting with the most disaffected sixteen year old.

Gaze not too long into the abyss, lest the abyss turn its gaze upon you. ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146 (1886).

Conversely, while it is wise to remember that very few of us get to choose when and where to go out–the Acme safe can crush each of us at a time and place of its own choosing, by dwelling too long on our own mortality, we risk falling into The Pit we're seeking to skirt. So, without getting too much more morbid, I will point you to Jon Mueller's cool new meditative project, Death Blues: The Celebration and Opportunity of Each Moment.

His initial manifesto is here, and you can check out more of the Death Blues music on bandcamp and/or buy a physical copy here. The deathblues website has much more from Jon and others on this most important of meta topics. Thanks, Jon.

Jon Mueller + Olivia Block - Reader Preview

See what the Read had to say about saki's upcoming in-store!
"Milwaukee percussionist and composer JON MUELLER has come a long way since his days in Pele, and he's been on a roll for the past few years, creating distinctive experimental music that makes no concessions to his indie-rock past. For his latest salvo, The Whole(Type), he creates massive, dronelike sounds from multiple fast-moving parts. Whereas Mueller's landmark 2008 album Metals (Table of the Elements) was a percussion-only reimagining of heavy metal, the new release takes folk music as its point of departure—namely simple hammer-dulcimer patterns that open and close the recording and elsewhere create a kind of shimmering whirr among snare-drum rolls, high-speed tom patterns, and looped vocal chants. The four pieces drift slowly by incrementally varying one component or another and consistently cast a powerful spell. In support of the album Mueller has created an aesthetically similar but totally new work called "I Almost Expect to Be Remembered as a Chair," which uses snare, recorded gong, and voice; he reshapes it according to the physical properties of each venue. As a bonus track for The Whole, Chicago sound artist OLIVIA BLOCK has made a 31-minute remix by rearranging elements from the album (as well as her own piano playing) into something entirely new—it's not just looped bits of the original atop a beat, like most remixes, but an epic journey with a couple of huge ebbs and flows of its own. Though Block doesn't radically transform any individual sound, she handles them the way a composer works with instrumental voices. Rather than re-create that remix today, she'll present a piece using different recordings she's made of Mueller, which she says will be "staggered, or slightly altered in some way" and mixed with the manipulated output of a prepared Autoharp." —Peter Margasak, Chicago Reader
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