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…?

"People have asked if there is a certain kind of meditation I practice to prepare for this kind of playing, and I say, "This. This is what I do.""

— Jon Mueller