Aaron Turner & Jon Mueller - Now That You've Found It - New LP Record 2022 American Dreams Pink Vinyl - Experimental Metal / Electroacoustic

Now That You’ve Found It marks the first full-length collaboration between Aaron Turner and Jon Mueller, and their second after last year’s In The Falls, released by Turner’s record label SIGE. The pair are iconoclastic musicians who have carved singular paths for decades, plying their trades in experimental, metal and rock and pursuing countless collaborations in many disciplines. Though Turner may be best-known for his work in the bands Isis and SUMAC, he’s also known as an artist, graphic designer and label head. Mueller’s collaborations run similarly far and wide: with Justin Vernon in Volcano Choir, with Pele, Collections of Colonies of Bees and Mind Over Mirrors, not to mention leadership of the acclaimed project Death Blues, and the patient solo percussion explorations -- like last year’s Family Secret, also released on American Dreams -- that have become his hallmark as of late. Amidst Turner and Mueller’s extensive bodies of work, Now That You’ve Found It is a delightfully weird standout, pushing the envelope of their practices in manners wild, untapped, and hitherto unexplored.

The album’s genesis was a dream in which the pair gave a concert in which they hardly played a note. “Yet the energy of the performance was very intense,” Mueller explains, “like something could blow at any moment. I woke up wanting to recreate that, and somehow I think we did.” Recreating it started at Turner’s House of Low Culture studio, reprising their past effort’s collaborations with recording engineer Matt Bayles (Keiji Haino + SUMAC, Mono) and mixing/mastering engineer James Plotkin (Merzbow, Jack Rose). “Once we were in the room recording,” says Mueller, “it all felt much more real, for better or worse. Reality became something to both work from and against.”