Things That a Mutant Needs to Know

A collection of fifty-five short tales and fifty-five brief musical works composed by a momentary collective of eighteen musicians. The text in your hands was conceived as an imaginary second volume of an anthology published in 1956 by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares called Short and Amazing Stories. Much like theirs, the anthology before you comprises an assortment of tales written or compiled by the most varied of authors (from Lucian of Samosata to Virginia Woolf, Emanuel Swedenborg to Blaise Cendrars): a diverse parade of walking trees, burning dresses, illnesses mysteriously cured, and deaths surprisingly reversed. The music consists of sonic readings and reactions to the stories composed by Christine Abdelnour, Claudio Baroni, Justin Bennett, Silvia Borzelli, John Butcher, Alan Courtis, DJ Sniff (Takuro Mizuta), Barbara Ellison, Ron Ford, Yannis Kyriakides, Anne La Berge, Reinaldo Laddaga, Francisco López, Machinefabriek (Rutger Zuydervelt), Andy Moor, Gabriel Paiuk, Santiago Santero, and Felipe Waller. They are fragments offered to the incidental, mutant reader to be listened to as s/he peruses the texts—soundtracks to the little films that they suggest, musical puzzles and mirrors that reflect the elusive events in the tales as if in placid or turbulent waters.