Endings
15,00 € VAT included
Only 1 left in stock
Limited to 250 hand-numbered copies as an unbound book.
30 pages feature black text and b&w illustrations printed on 80# Cougar Cover.
“Endings combines eleven very short stories (in a boxed, spineless book) with a 30-min. CD-R of reading music, and several black-and-white illustrations by Kaveh Soofi, the Bay Area graphic artist who designed the cover for Pele’s last album. Mueller’s stories are by far the most exciting piece of the puzzle. The author uses the concept of “endings” to create postcard length vignettes launching the reader into a darkly absurd and chaotic world where narrative seems to strive immediately toward a prophetic conclusion. The extreme shortness of the texts provides that no character or scenario is developed outside of a series of scrupulous, often ridiculous details serving only the anticipation of some unifying finale. Mueller always delivers the goods, in the sense that he hurl seach clipped plotline into an unmistakable, impassable “end;” how ever his endings are never the epiphanies his stories require. Instead they offer only the further mystification of an already lost cast of characters, managing to transform a clever variety of hum-drum pursuits and circumstances into windows to another hellish dimension. A man, inexplicably followed while on the way to the grocery store, eventually confronts his enraged pursuer, severs his own finger, and proceeds to reverse the chase, threatening the other man with the bloody appendage. Another character puts on a play for his dinner guests starring a picture of his dead son, whom he directs: “Sing, boy! Sing!” A business executive returns from an emergency call to find his interrupted interviewee sipping from the potential employer’s coffee cup, his eyes rising in blank defiance. Most impressive is Mueller’s ability to streamline each story with a detail-driven first-person narrative that assumes normalcy and connectedness, only to completely break down by the end. More than simple plot twists, the author’s endings might becalled ‘anti-epiphanies’ in the way they are positioned, through a striking economy of language, to effectively dismantle the story’s prior logic. Mueller’s musical accompaniment is unlike anything I’ve heard from him yet and clearly serves the box’s theme. A faded symphonic loop plays over and over to simulate a continuous, regenerating “ending,” essentially a false ending that, in its 19-sec.length, reminds me of the obscured, darkened tones of a Badalamenti score played out like one of William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, only without disintegrating. The atmosphere is soothing for a small second, but ultimately turns to a sinister, anxious tension, both apt and almost nauseating when coupled with Mueller’s words. Soofi’s illustrations are less fitting, but interesting nonetheless. From the look of it they are digital images arranged comic-strip-style but without any explicit narrative. The images are almost all stylized, grey toned portraits, progressively clouded, shadowed, fragmented, cropped, and later barraged by clusters of nail-covered blocks. I can see comparisons to Francis Bacon’s portraiture, with the sectioned murkiness and sketchy inaccuracies reminding me of animations by South African artist William Kentridge, though Soofi’s work has an unsettling geometric base that feels very unique. Endings is well worth it to anyone keen on interesting packaging and multimedia formats; I amstill involved in picking apart and connecting the contents of this beautiful release, no end in sight.”
