Jon Mueller - Canto (2019)

Experimental, avant-garde percussionist Jon Mueller presents some of his most impressive work in ‘Canto’, a steeply possessed invocation of reverberant doom and mesmerising vocal processes comparable with music by everyone from John Duncan and La Monte Young to Harry Bertoia and Lussuria

Last heard in these quarters on the ‘Tongues’ album, which we compared with a “life-affirming ayahuasca trip,” Jon Mueller returns with another deeply haunting suite in ‘Canto’, alchemising gongs, voice and percussion into diaphanous but filigree-detailed drone expanses that bookend a remarkable piece of sustained, extended vocal technique influenced by his studies with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, where, in Mueller’s own words: “The driving energy of drums is replaced by deep contemplation and wonder, question, confusion, darkness and ultimately, calm.”

Each titled after a Sufi text, the three tracks are intended to represent parts that create a whole, “just as a canto is a part of a longer poem.” In ‘Oil’ a lonely bell and sallow vocal mantra light the entrance to an exponentially cavernous space awash with shivering chimes and rumbling waves of metallic gong clangour - think John Duncan meditating in the middle of a ‘Sonambient’ performance by Harry Bertoia - while the layered vocal intonations of ‘Wick’ succinctly bend the mind’s eye with ancient magick, and in the final tract of ‘Flame’ he returns to an almost static space echoing with distant pulses in a way that reminds of Lussuria at his most occult and unsettling.