Locally based drummer, percussionist and composer Jon Mueller’s career has been filled with fascinating music, from Pele to Collections of Colonies of Bees to Volcano Choir and more. However, his most recent project – Death Blues – might be his most interesting and ambitious.

Started in 2011, Death Blues is a multi-media performance project taking on the idea of death, the idea that our lives are finite, and using those realizations "as impetus to become more present in each moment." Each part – "Death Blues," "Here: An Advanced Study in Death Blues," "Non-fiction" and "Ensemble" – hones in on a different aspect of Mueller’s mission, digging into ideas like focus and aim, and creating our own realities with the help of multiple artistic mediums and senses – including his captivating, almost primal musical arrangements.

"Ensemble," arriving Saturday night to Alverno College’s Pitman Theatre as a part of the Alverno Presents series, serves as the project’s finale, a look into the idea of perception and how it is made by ourselves and others. Before it hits the stage Saturday night, I had a conversation with Mueller (no relation) about the origins of "Ensemble" and the whole project, records, the state of music – and those who consume it – and life after Death Blues. 

OnMilwaukee.com: When did you and composer William Ryan Fritch come together and decide you wanted to come together on the arrangements for "Ensemble"?

Jon Mueller: We met through his record label. I bought a record from them, and they ended up connecting us. We shared some emails, just getting to know each other as friends. That’s all it was really about initially. Then eventually, we thought maybe there was some stuff we could work on at some point.

We got on the phone one day, and we talked for quite a while – over an hour – about stuff from our past and how we got involved in music. We started talking about what we were working on at the present time, and for me, Death Blues was really the main project. So Will said, "What kind of record do you want to make next? What are the characteristics that you want?" And I said to continue putting this Death Blues stuff on, there are certain things that I would love to include that I don’t have the ability or the means to take it in much bigger places. I went over that criteria with him, and he said, "OK, let’s do that."

As a project, he understood it as a project, and he understood musically what we were going for. He’s a film music composer, so he spends most of his time hearing and seeing what it is people want a musical translation for. So I think Will was perfect at hearing what I wanted to do and saying, "I have ideas for how to fulfill that." So it snapped into place really easily and quickly, and it just took off from there. We worked on it for a long time, but it all went pretty smoothly for the most part.

OMC: Where did these questions and ideas about death come from for this project?

JM: The whole idea for the project really struck me when I was in New Orleans in 2011. I was down there to do a talk at the university, and numerous people I met were talking about when the next hurricane was going to hit that was as bad or worse than Katrina. No one really referred to it as a possibility; everyone referred to it as an inevitability.

I thought that’s scary, and I thought and assumed everybody was planning on eventually moving and getting out of here before that happens, right? That just makes sense. But nobody really mentioned that. Everybody talked about when it happens again, but nobody said anything about how we got to get out of here or we have to make plans.

I thought how odd on one hand, but on the other hand, New Orleans is a really magical place. It’s really incredible in so many ways, ways far beyond what I understand it to be with the limited time I’ve spent there. It’s really an incredible place, and I thought if something’s really good in your life, if you leave it and run away because there’s some kind of risk or danger involved, how good is your life going to be?

That sort of felt like a metaphor for all of us, living in our own New Orleans to some degree. There are important things in our life that are fundamentally essential to us. I think there’s a lot to be said about identifying with stuff that is really important to oneself and focusing and amplifying those things instead of all of this other potentially negative stuff. That’s essentially where the value of our lives comes into play, not so much in constantly changing where else it might be. And so that kind of became the impetus of the project.

The thoughts about death really begin and end with the idea that death is a reminder that there’s a limited time to do all this stuff. So do we decide to run around and chase all these potential unknowns and improvements in our lives, or do we spend the time looking around us and saying there’s a tremendous amount of great valuable things in my life, looking at those more closely and realizing how great one’s life is. And maybe it can get even better based on those things and understanding those things more instead of trying to find them somewhere else.

OMC: You debuted this in 2012 at Alverno Presents. How has the project evolved over the past three years for you?

JM: The project itself has always sort of had a pretty big understanding of what it was and what it was going to produce since early on. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily evolved outside of that. "Ensemble," the record and the event we’re doing for Alverno Presents this weekend, is part of the finale of the project. It isn’t going to be producing anymore recordings or anything; we still may do performances of the material throughout the year, but as far as the project or the story goes, it won’t be continuing beyond than that.

OMC: Why are you bringing the project to a finale?

JM: I think the whole progression of what’s happened with the project musically – "Ensemble" being the most grand and huge display of musical ideas within the project – are sort of at the peak, so it seems like a natural place to say, "OK, this is the limit."

It’s not a sense of quitting or cutting things short. I feel in this case we had an idea of what to do with this project, and we fulfilled it, and that’s a pretty good feeling. That’s an accomplishment when you can see something through to the end that you created for it. 

OMC: What’s next for you after Death Blues?

JM: Death Blues I think inspired a lot of ideas for other things that I could do, so I’ve been working on this project called "Initiation." It’s about records and what records mean to us, mostly on an individual level but also what they mean in the world and what they represent to us as people.

OMC: What do they represent?

JM: On a more personal level, certainly being a musician, records have a lot of different meanings to me than what they do to record buyers and music fans. So I’m looking at it from both of those perspectives, like what does it mean to me as somebody who makes records, and why do I make records, and is that system within being a musician – you put out a record, you play shows to support it which then gives you the money to put out the next record, which you then play shows to support it – does that repetitive cycle work? Is that not something that should be analyzed and maybe changed in some ways.

I feel like music, like all industries, it’s struggling, but also like all industries, it needs innovation on some level, and I’m just curious how much of that is happening. It’s funny that creative industries are the least creative in terms of how they adapt to changes. This is just my humble stepping back and looking at that as a musician, like what does this whole process mean and why does it work this way.

OMC: It’s interesting talking about records because that seems to be what some artists are trying to do nowadays, taking records and moving that forward. Childish Gambino had a whole script that went with his last album, and you had Beck releasing an album of sheet music. Do you think any of these conceptual "records" have a way of resonating into a larger pop cultural world? 

JM: I don’t know about that. In Beck’s case, I saw a lot of people react so negatively to that because, let’s be honest, it’s kind of annoying. We’re so used to getting things so quickly and easily these days that when somebody puts up any kind of hurdle or work to get to it, it almost seems ridiculous or unnecessary. You can argue that forever.

What’s interesting about all of this stuff is that it asks you, the fan, to become a participant, and what I find fascinating is that people object to that. Not everybody, but there are people who object to that and don’t want to participate in anything; they just want to passively consume. I’m not judging that in any way; I certainly do that too. I think that’s an interesting thing that’s happening in our lives right now.

OMC: Plus, with YouTube and the Internet nowadays, there's this increasing commoditization of music and art. It’s a consumer first market right now – for better and worse.

JM: Yeah, these are only my experiences, so it’s hard to say that this is what’s happening in the world, but at some point, you have to say something is happening.

Years ago, maybe 2012 or something, I had a record come out, and I was trying to do different things with how I was getting it out to people who were following me. I sent a newsletter out, and I said if 10 people will write me back a one-page, brief essay answering this question or writing about records – some kind of experience with an early record or maybe the first record you remember getting – and I’ll send you a copy of this new LP for free. This could be anywhere in the world.

So I was sort of losing money on this venture, but what I was getting out of it was these stories. I wanted to have a number of these stories and do something interesting with that on my site – and, in turn, they get the free LP, which had just come out and I assumed people on my mailing list would want it.

What was ironic is meanwhile it was for sale on my site. I sold out of all the copies I had for sale. One person wrote back an essay and got a free copy. That really spoke to me about that burden, that idea that it’s easier to just pay $20 and get the LP than to sit and think and write a page of text.

I just think that’s interesting, that’s all. You start thinking about these things, and it builds how I’m looking at all these projects I do and why I do them and what I’m hoping to do. I’m not trying to change anybody or make anybody think a certain way, but I’m hoping to get people to think about these same ideas that I’ve thought about. Because I think it’s interesting; this is our lives and the state of our society. There’s no reason to not think about this stuff.