The Wire: Physical Changes review

Nick Cain wrote this very nice review/overview of the record in the June edition of The Wire magazine.

“Milwaukee based percussionist Jon Mueller is a busy man who skirts the edges of post-rock, electronica and drone in Mouths and Collections of Colonies of Bees, collaborates with Lionel Marchetti and Z’EV, and improvises solo and with the likes of Jeph Jerman, Jason Kahn and Tim Catlin.  Mueller’s 2008 album Metals opened a new chapter in his solo output.  Like a metal album with all instrumentation save percussion stripped away, its sensory assault of precise, pummelling rhythms contrasted starkly with his previous solo releases.

Physical Changes is an extrapolation of Metals, which pivots on “Nothing Changes”, a 26 minute composition created by Mueller and then handed over to a quartet of collaborators to rearrange.  In its original form it introduces discrete sounds and loops them, adding percussion and gradually building all the elements into a sustained and intense barrage of high speed, geometric rhythms.  The piece’s volume and intensity make it an overwhelming experience, but it’s packed with detail – changes and movements in the rhythms are clearly audible, and Jim Schoenecker’s analog synth and Fred Lonberg-Holm’s cello add textural grit.  Maximalist for its sheer power, minimalist for its organisation of sound and use of repetition, it’s a curiously hybrid form.  The percussive rhythms are maintained in a kind of high-energy holding pattern, a stasis produced by extreme physical effort, always on the point of collapsing or blurring into pure texture.

Its four rearrangements are studies in contrast.  James Plotkin’s two versions make explicit the link to the genre of metal, with at times bombastic results.  On “Change is the Only Evidence of Life”, he uses Mueller’s percussion as source material, depressing it into a flat mass of rhythms, then drawing out a beat in isolation and distorting it, every so often panning frequencies across the stereo spectrum.  Plotkin adds guitar and electronics to “Things Will Not Stay the Way They Are”, surfing the momentum of the rhythms with skyscraping guitar arcs, or swamping them with sludgy distortion.

Dan Burke of Illusion of Safety renders “Nothing Changes” as “The Only Constant Thing is Change”, a 26 minute deconstruction which plays with hierarchies of positioning, overlaying the percussion with gloopy electronics, muting it and eventually dispensing with it altogether.  On the DVD an even more radical reconfiguration soundtracks David Dinnell’s landscape footage. Contributions from Marcus Schmickler’s electronics and Schoenecker are added, the latter arranging the results into a noise-drone crescendo, a spectacular if unrecognisable mutation of “Nothing Changes”.  It’s this flexibility of approach, combined with a willingness to connect disparate forms and the project’s sheer scope and ambition, which make Physical Changes Mueller’s most significant solo release to date.”

A special edition of this CD/LP/DVD set can be found in the Shop.  Also see the Events page for info on the upcoming Physical Changes live dates.