The Muttering Sickness
The Muttering Sickness is an audio art collective facilitated by Davis Schneiderman and Don Meyer. The Muttering Sickness records, manipulates, and derealizes. We receive messages from the manifold channels of a world washed in the sounds of its own irony, and we play the results back through the mechanism of the electronic revolution.
The Muttering Sickness has performed at the Chicago Humanities Festival and the annual European Beat Studies Network conferences in Tangier (2014) and Brussels (2015). Recent works include The Last Days of Radio album (Fast Speaking Music).
"The Whole World is Watching: 1968 Chicago, Today" - The Muttering Sickness will perform at the annual European Beat Studies Network conference in Paris this September (2017)
MODERN BUSINESS MACHINES is a collage video from The Muttering Sickness collective, scored for four different-but-interrelated audio-video experiences. Taking as its starting point the Afrofuturist aesthetic of the character of J., from Regina Taylor’s stop, reset, the four audio tracks of MODERN BUSINESS MACHINES explore aural space, new media, and dj culture within the embedded discourses of print technology, Sun Ra, and the remix of its objects.
“The City of Interzone: Chicago” - The Muttering Sickness performed at Interzone: A Burroughs Birthday Bash, a program hosted by the Chicago Humanities Festival in partnership with Lake Forest College (Nov. 8, 2014).
“Footsteps" - Davis Schneiderman as The Muttering Sickness at the annual European Beat Studies Network in Brussels, Belgium (Oct. 30, 2015)
“The City of Interzone: Tangier" - Joshua Corey and Davis Schneiderman as The Muttering Sickness at the annual European Beat Studies Network conference in Tangier, Morocco (Nov. 20, 2014)
The Last Days of Radio (Fast Speaking Music, 2015) is a supercharged aural odyssey through the multiform broadcasting nodes of the twentieth century. The Last Days of Radio uses samples available only from the respective era. Where the palette of the 1940s draws from newsreels, Fascist rallies, and Tokyo Rose, the insular 1970s traps the listener in a muscle-car death machine riding the long road to nowhere.
Davis Schneiderman is a multimedia writer and scholar. He is the Director of Lake Forest College Press/&NOW Books, Associate Dean of the Faculty, and Director of the Center for Chicago Programs at Lake Forest College.
Composer and musicologist Don Meyer has written original scores for a number of independent films, incidental music and sound collages for plays, online literary journals, dance troupes, choirs, chamber music ensembles, and television commercials. He is currently Professor Music Department at Lake Forest College.