“By wet-nurse wolf, devoid of wolfish rage”: An Interview with Ut Mutem
Concrete music.
On Friday December 20th, the experimental looping tape manipulation project Ut Mutem will release their latest record Wet Nurse via Dissociation Recordings. It is an impressively thoughtful and mature album, one that marks a moment of evolution and progress in the project’s short but prolific career. It is a meditation on new life pieced together by so many of the disparate sounds that make up living on any given day. I conducted an interview via email with Andrew Lee, the beautiful baby boy behind Ut Mutem, about the band, the new album, and just what musique concrete is anyways.
IGoM: For the vast uninitiated, tell us about Ut Mutem. From where and whence did this project spring?
UM: It all started during COVID lockdown when I was participating in a handful of online academic conferences. In one of my presentations, I used the example of tape decks and cassette tapes as a metaphor for bodies and DNA. Another graduate student in the audience hit me up afterward and asked if I experimented with tape music, which I hadn’t ever tried at the time. He shared with me some of his excellent musique concrete stuff, and we even almost joined forces to co-author an essay sort of combining our research and something having to do with tapes and plasticity or repetition and difference; I don’t know, I can’t remember exactly as it didn’t come to fruition. But it did give me the idea to try tape loops out myself.
I already had one of these newer Crosley radio/cassette player combos as I do listen to tapes a lot. And it was easy to find a diagram demonstrating a few different lengths of tape loops you can make to get different lengths of time. And once I got my hands on some blank tapes, I tried out a simple, like, 5-second loop and recorded onto it from classical radio. From there I just started recording those loops into Garageband. I would then record another and layer it over the previous one, playing around with different arrangements and effects. I knew then that I had found something which I could really run with as a vehicle to compose music without any traditional instruments; I feel like I’ve always been frustratingly bad at playing instruments. I also considered how this method provides limitless possibilities for collecting and collaging audio together, sounds that can be sourced from almost anywhere. I was already exposed to artists who were making music, at least in part, with similar methods; so, inspiration from those artists/writers in books like Audio Culture and Tape Delay took on more than just expanding my listening horizons but also pushing me to create for myself.
“Ut Mutem” also came from a conference presentation I gave. I was rehearsing an etymology of the Latin forms of the word alter and its conceptual proximity to the Latin forms of the word mutate (it was a conference on “Altered States”). This one worked much better than the tape one. I don’t remember exactly why I landed on this, but my wife who was studying Latin at the time helped me with it. And, I didn’t use this part in the presentation, but as I was flipping around a Latin dictionary going back and forth from “alter” and “mutare,” I came up with ut mutem (or some close variation of that). We translate it as “in order that I should change.” And I thought that fit quite nicely with how I was thinking about moving forward with recording tape loops—never placing restrictions on my approach, allowing the process to change as necessary in order to continue creating.
IGoM: I’ve never been satisfied with any definition of musique concrete I’ve read, but I sense that, somewhere in that response, there’s a crystallizing of it. How do you understand musique concrete? Has your understanding changed since you started recording?
UM: Oh boy. Well, I don’t know, really. Early on, I was thinking more about “ambient” and “industrial” as the sort of signifiers of what I was attempting to make sonically, and the processes I was utilizing. But those also elude satisfying definitions depending on, well, a lot of things. I was thinking about industrial in the “cut-up” sense, à la Throbbing Gristle, and ambient in the sense of Basinski’s “disintegration loops,” for example. But those are not the first things that come to mind for many when considering those respective terms. With musique concrète there is an even longer history to consider, although generically I understand it to be more about the arrangement of pre-recorded or existing sounds in composition rather than a notation for instruments to execute. And though that may sound like how I described starting this project, I didn’t think of what I was doing as musique concrète. Probably because it seemed more conceptually and historically distant to me, like dada or Surrealism. However, I think I’ve come around to finding more inspiration from what I have been able to discern as musique concrète.
Besides the use of tape loops as composition, I’ve also come to understand it as utilizing more-or-less everyday objects for physically extracting sound—often stripped from their context as they are not typically musical in nature. I’ve got, what I think is a really fun example, one that is not of my own. I did a show earlier this year with Water is the Sun, a ritual ambient, drone duo made up of Mkl Anderson (Drekka) and Adam Parks (Timber Rattle), and, without going into the just utterly incredible soundscapes they were producing, at one point during their set, Mkl started playing with coins—not, like, US currency, but larger coins—and at one point put a few in his mouth. His microphone was able to pick up the scraping of the coins as he swished them around, and this visceral, more-or-less improvised moment added such a powerful texture to the droning ambience they were creating with tapes and other devices. It immediately reminded me of Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio when the titular torturer-painter erotically challenges his model’s resolve by forcefully adding coins to his mouth, one at a time in patient intervals, indeed as the model’s payment, while demanding he keep still. The sound of the coins in the model’s mouth, as I remember, is the most sonorous aspect of the scene’s audio. That’s musique concrète.
Now I use a mic’d up antique fish skinner in my sets.
IGoM: I knew you’d bring up Jarman. I just read this morning Olivia Laing’s short essay on him titled “Sparks Through Stubble.” She has this great line: “Would there be a future? Was the past irreparably destroyed? What to do? Don’t waste time. Plant rosemary, red-hot poker, santolia; alchemise terror into art.” I wish I had said that last bit about Ut Mutem: “alchemise terror into art.” We’ll talk about live shows in a bit, but I want to focus on Wet Nurse now. Your latest record. The record that feels, to me, the most fully formed. What alchemy is afoot here?
UM: The idea for Wet Nurse did indeed transform over the last year with the record being the penultimate iteration. It first came to me after I completed the first ut mutem short film Myein. In that film, my wife, who was very pregnant with twins at the time, played an unnamed goddess who initiates me into a cult of submission through a ritually transformative process, which takes up the bulk of the film. After our daughters were born, the idea for another similarly-styled film came to me in Wet Nurse where I wanted to bring a baby doll to life by breastfeeding it. For a variety of reasons that never materialized as a film, but I re-approached the concept when I was curating an art show with a couple of friends. The piece that I showed at this exhibit Nothing Left Except was inspired by Nam June Paik; I set up a camcorder connected to a small TV and recorded and displayed an assemblage of frozen breast milk that I had molded into cubes and my sigil logo. Over the course of an hour or so they all melted into the offering bowl that they were assembled in. That offering bowl, with a melting form of my sigil, is now the cover art for the album version of Wet Nurse.
The tracks on the album more or less came about through experimenting with processes of sampling and layering. All of them, save one, were recorded in one take after a bit of an improvised genesis. I have a very limited amount of time to sit down and compose on the spot, so I tend to work very quickly when afforded the opportunity. These songs came together in that manner, one at a time in relatively short bursts of working with my current setup at home. I can definitely say that when I set out to start recording tracks, which would appear together as an album, I was inspired by many of the artists I booked shows with this year. For example, I did three nights in a row with Drekka when he came through Oklahoma and that was the first time I really got to play around with improvisation live. I used the same source materials each night but arranged them differently without much forethought. And that was a really motivating experience. One of the most valuable things I learned from doing shows with Drekka was that being aware of what you have at your disposal, and foregoing strict planning, allows the product to be an expression of that moment in time; minimal preparations allow for surprise or chance elements to seep in. It’s terribly exciting.
The final iteration of Wet Nurse will be the release show on the Winter Solstice where I’ve got a few things planned that will expand, and bring to a close, the concept of the record. I’ll have another television piece set up and am going to attempt to do a set that is more performance art than my usual live set. And that will be it for Wet Nurse. But I certainly will not waste time, the seeds for the next projects were planted long ago.
IGoM: I was fortunate—blessed, if you will—to see you perform a collaborative set with Perdy Slow on the floor of his living room earlier this week here in Atlanta. You and I talked about how the cycles of defamiliarization and refamiliarization with which musique concrete and other forms of noise/ambient music ensorcell listeners while we also addressed directly some of the more particularly dramatic narratives that listeners begin to create in their heads while dealing with this interplay of re-/de-familiarization. Monday night, it was the drama of the re-cycling dialed telephone, pause, and busy signal, wherein each pause between dial and signal held space for a replenishment of hope only to be dashed by the inevitable busy signal. In many ways, this is entirely accidental and yet it’s also inherent to the very act of the set’s creation. Tell us a little bit more about the shows you have coming up and how you think philosophically about Ut Mutem live sets.
UM: I like to approach live sets as constructions of abstracted soundscapes, tones and textures with a healthy sprinkling of the familiar—samples that ground the piece in something that might be recognizable, but made strange. Like you mention, I really like instigating that interplay. And, like the telephone dial, which I recorded with my little voice recorder a few days prior in a hotel room; or, sampling voices from life or from various media, each live set ends up being the culmination of sounds collected in between live performances. So, in many ways I am telling a story through sound-environment construction of what I’ve been sonically and physically interacting with since the last time I played live. The improvisational element behind this kind of live composition, for me, makes it all a very introspective experience, and I hope that creates an inviting space for others to enter into.
I’ve got the tape release show up next, which has three other acts, two of which will be making their live debut. All local to OKC except my brother-in-law coming in from NYC for the holidays. After that, kicking off the year on January 2nd is a show I am incredibly excited about playing: Ironing from Gainesville, FL is touring his party time plunderphonics and it will be his first time in OKC. It also has Adam Parks (Timber Rattle, Water is the Sun) performing as Lightning White Bison; he will be doing a live manipulated 4-track score to his buddy Jason Papparielle’s short film An Observance of Absence. After that, we are working to get the amazing sound/performance artist Sofia Silueta up from Houston for a show.
IGoM: Finally, what would you say to allegations that Ut Mutem is plagiarized from my idea, expressed to you in 2016 when we lived at Twin Oaks Drive, that we should start making ambient music? Is the history of Duke Nukem Ut Mutem built upon thievery and deception the likes our friendship has never known?
UM: I cannot deny the possibility. You certainly planted the seeds, as it were, because, with our mutual affection for Enya and the Environments vinyl and tape series, you then opened the gates for me into ambient and noise.
IGoM: Just as I suspected.
Wet Nurse delivers via Dissociation Recordings
on Friday December 20th.
Tapes are limited to 50. Grab one or just snag the digital.
Go see Ut Mutem live.
