Jon Mueller: Family Secret
American Dreams Records

Family Secret is an uncommon album, which is only to be expected when the creator involved is Jon Mueller. The Wisconsin-based percussionist and drummer brings an experimental mindset to every project with which he's associated, be it Death Blues, Volcano Choir, Mind Over Mirrors, or Within Things, the latter a curiosity shop of sorts. Issued under his own name, Family Secret surprises in many ways, including the fact this latest Mueller release includes—wait for it—no drumming, or at least none discernible as such. He did, however, produce the four tracks using a percussive arsenal including gongs, drums, cymbals, and singing bowls, though the instruments' identifying characteristics are diminished (one presumes) by heavy processing. For want of a better description, brooding soundscapes appear that register less as arrangements of recognizable instrument timbres and instead as discomfiting meditations one might associate with occult practice.

Tension is sustained throughout, with Mueller staying true to the project's macabre quality. Its origins can be traced to his past, specifically to 1990 when experiments in home lighting led to the imagining of alternate personas and environments. For Family Secret, he returned to to that idea by creating the material under customized lighting conditions that lent a hallucinatory aspect to the production process. While it's not one Muller himself created, the mysterious attic environment shown in Niki Feijen's cover photograph aligns effectively with the aural tone of the album. Is the room's floor meeting an oddly illuminated wall or is it a ledge that could lead to a death plummet? Only Feijen knows.

Establishing the album's tone clearly, “Whose Emptiness” emerges forebodingly in an ethereal flow of ghostly reverberations, the sound mass softly pulsating and murmuring like wind blowing across a graveyard; enveloping and engulfing, the material seeps into the listener's consciousness like disease infecting the body. The eeriness carries over into “Black Glass,” a silvery dronescape punctuated by metallic accents and cavernous rumblings suggestive of some awakening monstrosity. At four minutes, “Ignited Hands” is dwarfed by the other pieces, but it's still long enough to impart its unsettling message. Scraping sounds and loud vaporous masses combine to suggest a torture operation of some merciless kind being carried out on an unfortunate victim. At album's end, “Welcome” proves to be a rather unusual invitation, given that the gloomy space into which one enters is cryptic in the extreme and thus makes for a visit more likely to induce nightmares than cheerful memories. Judging from the evidence at hand, Mueller's family must harbour its fair share of dark secrets.

February 2021