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CUSP PRESENTS: JON MUELLER // NOAH DEPEW

  • Convivium 33 Gallery (map)

Monday, March 27
Doors 7:30, music 8pm
Convivium 33 Gallery
1433 E. 33rd St, Cleveland

$15 suggestion donation, no one will be turned away for lack of funds

About the artists:

Jon Mueller’s The Future is Unlimited, Always is an examination of time, meditation and loss. In this piece, released in 2022 on the Virtues label as a CD/book, the Wisconsin-based percussionist’s usual repetitive rhythms and textures are replaced with fluid, calm tones, overlaid with otherworldly wails. In live performances of the piece, Mueller employs a variety of gongs, percussion and electronics to create an atmosphere equally as easy to get lost in as it is to be propelled by.

“Mueller’s music is usually completed by the overtones and feedback that arise from the interaction between his playing and the space where it occurs, but for this recording he has drawn those elements into the foreground. Long vocal and metallic tones stretch over subliminally rumbling drums, directing the listener’s attention up and out.” – Bill Meyer, The Wire

“The Future is Unlimited, Always captures Mueller at his most spacious: layers of frequencies and tones that are as engaging as they are mysterious, and capturing more than just audio, but a deeper sense of existence.” – Creaig Dunton, Brainwashed

Mueller’s aim has long been to move drums, percussion and rhythm from its anticipated backbeat to a central musical focus, something more intuitive and natural than usually imagined. Audiences throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, and the United Kingdom have experienced this idiosyncratic point of view as, paradoxically, both ‘cathartic’ and ‘meditative’. Notable solo performances have taken place at the Guggenheim Museum, New Museum, Issue Project Room, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, Alverno Presents, Columbia Festival of Experimental Music, SXSW, Big Ears Festival, Hopscotch Fest and Witching Hour Festival.

Outside of his solo work, Mueller has performed and recorded with Mind Over Mirrors, was a founding member of the bands Volcano Choir, Collections of Colonies of Bees and Pele, and has worked in depth with artists Aaron Turner, Faith Coloccia, Dawn Springer, Chris Hefner, Jason Kahn, Asmus Tietchens, Z’EV, Andrew McKenzie, Rhys Chatham, Jarboe, James Plotkin, Duane Pitre, Jonathan Kane, and Raymond Dijkstra.

His solo work has been released by Table of the Elements, Type Recordings, Important Records, Taiga Records, SIGE Records, American Dreams, and others.

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In both his sound art and his visual design, Cleveland’s Noah Depew reflects on the navigation of an unnatural world, and distills those experiences into a language that is unfamiliar yet still intelligible. These sublimations can be observed in projects ranging from the intense collaged noise of earlier solo work to the more recent Burning Plastic Blues Band, which utilize synthesis, effected guitar, and tape manipulation to achieve an auditory force that provokes an internal examination of the listener. Like sunlight through a magnifying glass, Depew captures an detailed textural experience and can focus it wherever he chooses.