JASON KAHN / JON MUELLER
papercuts
CD, Crouton
Sound is all around us. Sit back and listen to whatever is around you in
the moment. Turn off that radio or that record-player and try to listen to
the sounds of your surroundings. Then try to dissect them, tell them apart,
find rhythms and logarithms in their structure or try to enjoy the
irrationality of these sounds and the accidents they evolve in. An
experience steered heavily by your own subconsciousness is what you can
expect. If you want to dive into the subconscious experience of someone
else, try the catalogue of Crouton music, which includes artists like Asmus Tietchens
or Hat Melter.
It might change the way you think about music.
This collaboration here, called “papercuts”, is exactly what the
title says. Both Jason Kahn and Jon Mueller are not unknown in their
“scenes”, though both are working in and on genres of music that will
never ever reach the ear of even a bigger minority. The fringes of art, even
though destined to grow ever closer to the center, will never be the place
where a lot of people meet, but will always stay the place where the most
interesting and fanatically immersed artists will be. There are more
analogies between the two, e.g. they are both percussionists that have
spread their interest and work way further than that. And finally they have
come together to record the handling, crumbling, folding, patting,
scratching, cutting or tearing of “various grades of handmade and
commercial paper”, as the inlay of this CD says. Jon Mueller first took
his hands to the recorded material, then Jason Kahn, then it was Mueller
again, who invited Chris Rosenau to sit with him and the final turn was
again Jason Kahn’s. The result is this delicate and intensive 18 minute
long piece of music.
A vast variety of sounds seep up from the floor, at first unrecognisable,
flirring over a steady hum like sitting on a transoceanic jetliner-flight,
various kinds of noises break the drone, that could either be digital
glitches or the original sounds. At times the two are easily announcable, at
other times you start to wonder, what is what. Is that a sound paper could
produce by itself without the help of a computer program? As a lot of
artists have proven, from the singing saw to Cage’s 4’33”, there is
music in every physical thing. Since only discovering the music would be too
little to be recognized these days, you’ll have to do something
exceptional with the newly born sounds and field of aural influence. Kahn
and Mueller follow that rule to the last. Towards the end the source becomes
more easily identifiable, though the way slowly crumpled paper sounds like a
crackling firelight still amazes me.
