“Mutanys” (2016-2017), 8-channel,
Patrick K.-H.

As the title suggests, the series is largely about mutations – to confirm this intention, mutation starts with the very orthography of the title.

A pivotal period of music history and theory was the beginning and middle of the XX century with its burst of music evolution theories, followed by biology-like mutation theories. Alike pre-darwinians, music people for centuries used to think that every music entity—be it genre or instrument—could be defined by a set of necessary traits that characterised its essence—that there was a precise definition for orchestra, opera, guitar, vocal, score, etc. (and of course there are “creationists” in music in now days). According to this “music creationism” paradigm, a guitar has a guitar essence – as well as music forms it would constitute – and can no more evolve into a squeak or murmur than a dinosaur can evolve into a bird.

One of conceptual breakthroughs that comes out of sound synthesis married to sound recording was the appearance of intermediate forms that are literally neither guitar nor murmur. Moreover, the mutants of that kind can vary in their qualities, and the variety of that qualities can suggest search of new music forms, stranger than ever existed.

The evolution of “Mutanys” had a winding path—prepared electric guitar later filtered and processed by graphic sound software, mixed into stereo, quadro, octophony and Acousmonium versions.