In 1,000 words, write about a brick.
– High school creative writing assignment.
This was the hardest thing I’d ever been asked to do, up to the time I was 17. The process of describing a brick-as-brick, without the bricolage of historical or practical information, reduced most of us in this class to rubble. In retrospect, we were being asked to attend to something – in its original meaning – to care for it, wrap a conceptual brick in a conception of words. At that age, it is hard to attend to anything, let alone something as humble and as geometrically simple as a brick.
Think of Jon Mueller’s Alphabet of Movements as this brick. Do so and you come close to giving it the place in the world it deserves. You will need to attend to it. That Mueller gives us so much to attend to is his gift (and challenge) to all those who go to him. Mueller has for many years encouraged us, through his music, his writing and his talks, to step intently into a state of listening. To do so requires both elemental change and incremental movement. I read Mueller’s Alphabet of Movements as his most viscerally defined call to listen: an abecedarium of small gestures leading to large effect.
I first heard the piece that comprises Alphabet of Movements live, at the New Museum in New York. Lights are cast upwards at Mueller’s face as he enters the piece he’s named after a line from Ann Lee, the leader of the Shaker religion: “I Almost Expect to be Remembered as a Chair.” The piece begins with a pattern on the snare, and over its nearly 20 minutes, Mueller brings in two loops of gongs. He so slowly and so deliberately and so patiently increases the volume on these loops, and then decreases them, that the listener loses track of beginning and end. Time is not present, but the listener is. How is this possible? If one attends to something, somehow all else fades away. The thing becomes real. The brick that is conjured, that suddenly appears in the listener’s hands, is the magic of existence. Attend to that.
“I Almost Expect to be Remembered as a Chair” is performed in two iterations on Type’s gorgeous LP release, first on snare, and second on two gongs. (It should be noted that James Plotkin’s superb mastering elicits so many details from the recording that it is hard to fathom.) The difference in one’s perception of each is immense, though the rhythmic patterns are consistent between them. Now: those patterns. As I listen to them, my mind is left to spiral round itself to the point that I cannot fully grasp where and when they change (and if and how they do) nor guide myself back to equilibrium. The brick, heavy though it is, isn’t a tether, and it can’t be used to build a cathedral. Its weight becomes that of life in the instant that Mueller pulls you straight from yourself.
As the looped recordings envelope Mueller’s live playing, past and present merge, and the room fills with some of the most immense and overpowering overtones imaginable. Each one reacts differently to a given rhythmic pulse, so as the pattern changes, as the volume changes, new characteristics form, both by Mueller, and beyond him. It is controlled, but the effect is not like the brick: it is free to mutate and float, guided but unruly, reaching towards pure idea but wild. To plant the seed of another idea: “Our nervous system uses changes in pitch, time, loudness, rather than being confused by those changes.” This from Arthur Benade’s Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics, a work Mueller has referenced and which contains a multitude of interpretational possibilities for Alphabet of Movements.
Alphabet of Movements is a companion to last year’s The Whole, and when I reviewed that album I was focused on Mueller’s intense discipline needed to bring himself, and therefore his listeners, to a place of challenged meditation. Alphabet of Movements shows that I was too simplistic. Mueller builds things, but he does so in the present. When Ann Lee said “I almost expect to be remembered as a chair,” she said so out of a great sense of pain that her religion would come to be viewed by its products: the gracefully simple, geometrically pure pieces of furniture and decorative arts that were to their makers practical and utilitarian objects. That the fruit of the religion might die on the vine (as it largely has for the Shakers) saddened this strong woman who’d made a life of ideas.
Whichever ways we embrace or reject thingness, we are forced to confront it. We have to pick up bungee cords on occasion, to hold things down. We each make our bricks of various sizes, hues and consistency. But what do we do to them? Alphabet of Movements might just be the ultimate primer on how to listen: how to try and catch those overtones, find the changes, or not find them and become lost in sound. It may not be a primer, something confined by words, but instead be an article of faith, a declaration in belief. It is non-doctrinal: there’s no code. Movement, after all, is gesture, and as much as one can try to choreograph something, it takes the dancer to embody the motion.
I fear I could write on about this somewhat endlessly, and I will say that the larger ideas expressed in Mueller’s deceptively constrained work point to a philosophy that could fill an all-night conversation, if not a book. It may be difficult to write about a brick, but Mueller makes it easy for this writer, at least, to envision a multitude of implied worlds. The pursuit of meaning, the invocation of questions, is what Mueller represents to me. Attend to it, care for it, listen to it and you will be broadened.
Yes, by the way, it’s incredible music. But it is so much more. And ever will be I suspect.
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