"Focusing on that singular, rolling sound brings you to a path inside this mysterious world."
—Foxy Digitalis

"…music that suggests gaping, unfathomable voids and distant threats."
—New York Times

Jon Mueller + Tom Lecky
All Colors Present

Why? Why do we obey and follow our compulsions? What do we seek as our horizon rolls away at a rate constant to our progress, in perpetual ceaseless motion, as we float forever forward in worldless, magnetized thrall?  All Colors Present vivifies an inchoate force that has propelled Jon Mueller since he first engaged sound with action. At the center of these two bilaterally symmetrical pieces is a source, an essential substance with no influence, precedent, or subsequent approval—just a cellular impetus to Exist.

Jon Mueller’s singular performance idiom is an awe-inspiring display of elegant athleticism, preternatural focus, brute restraint, and ecstatic, monastic reverie. It requires and demands a state of inner quietude from witnesses. Here, recorded in real-time and with no overdubs, two crisp beats repeat and reverberate—one, then two; two, then one—in a confluence of hand and stick, drumhead, and heartbeat. Yet, from this seemingly metronomic exercise blossoms, every possible tint and hue of infinite spectral sound.

An apt reference point resides within the broad, decades-spanning catalog of Table of the Elements. Like Tony Conrad’s surging Outside the Dream Syndicate, the aural and conceptual headwinds are real, but the perceived affronts of provocation are not. These works are not endurance challenges, nor are they threadbare minimalist upholstery. They are not obstacles. They are invitations. Within their simplicity and formalism await a sympathetic repose, a comfort. These are gestures of generosity. 

Why do we undertake these efforts? Mueller doesn’t overtly intend this to be his final recording. Yet he recognizes an apotheosis of a lifelong path, a throughline that has dragged him from his origin to this moment. None of us may ever grasp the purpose of our innermost drive. We strain towards destinations of numinous obliteration.

What is the sense of it all? The answer may be another question. Have we at least honored ourselves and that most primal urge that beckons us to surge further and farther and beyond…?

• • • • •

Jon Mueller

“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.”
—The Wire

 "While Family Secret doesn’t sound like anything else that Mueller’s done, it shares similarities with his previous work in its uncanny ability to use sounds to stir nameless emotions."
—Chicago Reader

Olivia Block + Jon Mueller

"Organ repetitions fuse with the metallic timbres Jon Mueller’s distinctive percussive techniques and it’s like I’m staring straight into the sun. The intensity is understated, but sit in this aural rinse long enough and the brightness is deliciously overwhelming."
— Foxy Digitalis

 "On The Mountains Pass, Block’s high, fragile voice threads through a sequence of stately piano and organ melodies, bursts of electronic sound, and alternately fragmented and driving rhythms.”
— Chicago Reader

Push for NIght + Jon Mueller

 "The result is an otherworldly sound trip that will have you on the edge of your seat. ‘Bypassing standard approaches to percussion’ is a kind of understatement here. The ‘thick, liminal record, rich with the dread, absurdity, and delirium of the past several years’ is clearly not easy listening material, but it will trigger your imagination in unexpected ways."
— 400 Lonely Things

 Volcano Choir

 "And for the climax of ‘Still,’ Mueller pulled off an extended drum roll that felt almost comic in its arena-rock intensity, as though Vernon had entrusted his accomplice to help demolish one caricature -- the cloistered, super-sensitive balladeer—with the force of another."
— LA Times

"The depth of the drums evoke not just canyons and churches, but the Grand Canyon and Sistine Chapel."
— Pitchfork

 Collections of Colonies of Bees

 "The neon-pastoral ambiance is broken by Jon Mueller's majestic kit work."
— Pitchfork

 

[Bio]

Jon Mueller’s singular performance idiom is an awe-inspiring display of elegant athleticism, preternatural focus, brute restraint, and ecstatic, monastic reverie.

Mueller’s approach requires and demands a state of inner quietude from witnesses. Yet, from his seemingly metronomic exercise blossoms every possible tint and hue of infinite spectral sound.

“My connection to playing drums is to use them to enter a different state of mind. What may seem like an escape is actually bringing an energy or feeling into a room. That energy is something I can’t really define, but it is distinct. Achieving it is the basis of quality by which I analyze my work. Ultimately, the construction of performances and the arrangement of sound in recordings, is to create an experience with that energy.”

Mueller studied jazz drumming with Hal Russell at Columbia College in Chicago, and singing with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela at the Kirana Center for Indian Classical Music in New York. A prolific performer, he tours extensively and has appeared at festivals and venues throughout the United States, Canada, England, Europe and Japan.

In addition to his solo work, Mueller has collaborated and performed with groups such as Mind Over Mirrors, Volcano Choir, Collections of Colonies of Bees, and Pele. He has also worked with artists including Olivia Block, Aaron Turner, Faith Coloccia, Dawn Springer, Chris Hefner, Jason Kahn, Hal Rammel, Asmus Tietchens, Z’EV, Rhys Chatham, Jarboe, James Plotkin, Duane Pitre, and Raymond Dijkstra. He has released music on renowned labels such as Table of the Elements, Type Recordings, Important Records, Taiga Records, SIGE Records, and American Dreams, among others.

• • • • •

 

A Conduit for History Exploding in the Present Moment

TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS is a curatorial network and interdisciplinary platform, live-event presenter, and fine-arts publisher of print, audio, and film, lauded by Pitchfork Media as “a national treasure.” Since its origin as a record label in 1993, TotE has been dedicated to preserving, promoting, and promulgating works by international creators of radical innovation. The organizations’s 170-plus releases — along with influential intermedia festivals — comprise a vital contemporary chronicle, a survey of meaningful eruptions across a broad horizon of sound, word, and vision.  Each unique project demonstrates how a publishing concern might romp wild, unbridled from the carousel of convention.

•     •     •     •     •

"The supremacy of Table of the Elements as an unwavering outpost of ultra-experimental strains can be attributed to its concomitant adherence to valiance. Most of the Table of the Elements catalog has no broad commercial appeal, and many of its projects are risky ventures, even with respect to the experimental marketplace. Yet, this philosophy of risk works because everybody associated with the label feels like they're doing important work releasing important records, and they're willing to go for broke to make it happen.”
—Grayson Haver Currin, Pitchfork

“The hallmarks of this New Archivism are beautiful and innovative packaging, elaborate and idiosyncratic liner notes, rare and obscure recordings ... Working with graphic designers such as the Grammy-winning Susan Archie, Jeff Hunt produced a collection that combines varied textures, lavish finishes, and period details with art from the era of the original source recordings. Their treatment of Robert Longo’s late 1970s photographs for Rhys Chatham’s releases could, for instance, measure up to what’s on view at most contemporary art centers. In addition to its archival endeavor, TotE also releases the new work of its avant-garde heroes and their devotees. TotE’s active support of the work of sonic pioneers ensures that theirs are living traditions — not ossified museum objects.”
—Thomas Peake, Art Papers

Tony Conrad: Completely In the Present
A Film by Tyler Hubby

"Hubby's film captures Conrad in all his facets ... broadly as a man determined to make 'abstract art funny, happy, energetic, joyful.' Conrad lived long enough to see his early recordings, barely or never released, get the reissue and the attention they deserve. ... [Completely In the Present] is a sharp, sweet, eloquent documentary about the merriest, most artistically expansive minimalist on record. His work and his life asserted the importance of listening for the sounds nobody else has heard."
—Chicago Tribune

“Joyous, exhilarating, and transformative, Tyler Hubby’s documentary is essential viewing for anyone involved in the history of music and visual art.”
—Artforum

"Conrad was 100 percent badass. Without Tyler Hubby’s documentary and Table of the Elements ... one of the great stories of American music and art might have gone underappreciated.”
—Henry Rollins

 

 

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All contents ©1992–2025 Table of the Elements ®2025 Table of the Elements. All Rights Reserved. Related media from the Table of the Elements Archive published courtesy the estate of Tony Conrad.

Since 1993, Table of the Elements has staked its claim on a massive enterprise. It intends nothing less than to rewrite the history of American music in the second half of the 20th century -- and beyond. The label’s 150-plus releases are a vital contemporary chronicle, a survey of meaningful eruptions across a broad horizon of improvised, experimental, minimal and outsider sounds.

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