Jon Mueller

Jon Mueller either spent the necessary time to teach his drums how to actually sustain something, or he found them lying in the same swamp as the Warner Bros. frog. In any case, he has coaxed a gorgeous CD out of them: complex textures of sustained snares, nocturnal bells, and asymmetrical rhythms arising as if from within the drums; all subtly ordered, sometimes melting from passage to passage, sometimes popping with tape-edit precision. The pieces have the gravity of fine drone work, but they are also injected with a dry wit and assembled with the mechanations of a puzzle master. There are no singing frogs on this disc, no merely novel moments. Mueller makes the most of his chorus, and the music resonates as something beyond the sum of its parts, however interesting those parts may be.

Reviews:

“Sometimes harsh, never dull, Mueller cuts huge swaths of sound; his distorted drumming calls to mind pieces produced by Norwegian Helge Sten (Deathprod). Like Sten’s work, the sounds are neither purely industrial nor entirely human.” - All About Jazz

“Two particular strong pieces of highly imaginative percussion music.” - Vital Weekly

“This is a record entirely made through pieces of a drum set, yet it sounds like a well oiled, fine tuned precision mechanism which allows entering the music in the same frame of mind that one has while listening to a Balinese ensemble - or to Organum, for that matter.” - Touching Extremes