Since the mid-'90s, Seattle-based guitarist Bill Horist has been making music within and without convention in a wide variety of settings and genres and has worked with many notables in rock, experimental, and new music. He has played on dozens of records and has performed throughout North and Central America, Europe, and Japan, collaborating with numerous leading lights in a beguiling range of genres. He delivers an idiosyncratic and richly emotive take on the world's most ubiquitous instrument; perhaps best known for his prepared guitar treatments, his work is widely regarded alongside masters like Fred Frith and Keith Rowe. He has cultivated a unique voice in a number of styles in the realms of jazz, rock, folk, and experimental music. Horist is also becoming known as a masterful acoustic fingerstyle player in the tradition of Leo Kottke and John Fahey, additionally incorporating elements from Asia, India, the Middle East, and West Africa. Mutei presents music composed and improvised by Horist for Calgary, Alberta-based choreographer Davida Monk's 2013 major dance work, Dream Pavilion. This is the second major work that Horist and Monk have created since their initial production, Lyric, and the resulting CD, Lyric/Suite (Accretions Records), were developed and released in 2003. Their longstanding collaboration has cultivated a highly integrated lexicon of sound and movement. Inspired by diminutive, carved Japanese statues called netsuke, Horist and Monk strive to bring this exquisite manifestation of humans, animals, fantastic creatures, and deities to life. With the basis of a prepared guitar score developed in-residence and augmented by percussion and đàn nguyệt (Vietnamese moon lute), Horist has created a mysterious and emotive sonic world, which two dancers embody. Despite the score being composed for live performance, Horist recorded a version with Scott Colburn and further augmented the work with conventional guitar, bass, and other electronics, thus creating a work that stands beautifully and strangely on its own in addition to being a powerful component of the choreographed work. Tracks on Mutei vary wildly from dark drone to plaintive and playful; from meditative ambience to squalls of visceral noise. Bill Horist: electric guitars, đàn nguyệt, bass, percussion, objects, electronics; Davida Monk: choreography; Helen Husak: dancer; Walter Kubanek: dancer.