Jon Mueller

The music of Milwaukee, Wisc., drummer/ composer/ improviser Jon Mueller is a feat of combined physical and mental focus. Mueller—who mans the kit both in Collections of Colonies of Bees and that band’s side project with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, Volcano Choir—plays both with incredible force and endurance. On his brilliant 2008 album Metals, for instance, he’d pound heavy metal drums for 20-plus minutes, punishing his kit until the pulses and a series of electronic hums turned into one colossal smear. In the triumphant, radiant Bees, his kick drum hits like a hammer to the chest. 

It’s not just about new percussive brutalism, though. Whether he’s using his drums as reverberation chambers to produce long, droning tones (as he does with Jeph Jerman and others) or using them as the static bed over which he chants and harmonizes (as he does on The Whole, a forthcoming release on the great label Type), Mueller turns his kit into an avenue of tonal exploration. And despite a quarter-century of playing, those ideas have never come into focus quite as much as they have in the past several years. Metals and last year’s Physical Changes, both released by the American experimental vanguard Table of the Elements, were as physical as they were immersive. And his new collaboration with acoustic drone wizard Z’EV for Important Records offers intense trips through the abyss, radiant tones acting as infinite corridors into a dark sonic space.

Jon Mueller’s work is ecstatic, aggressive and intricate, the sort of music that steals your attention and steels your imagination. And live, where the audience can peer behind the curtain and see how he gets his sounds and how he employs his stamina, Mueller is not to be missed. —Grayson Currin