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Available Formats:
Digital
Description
‘Things that a mutant needs to know, more short and amazing stories’ is a collection of fifty-five short tales and fifty-five brief musical works composed by a momentary collective of eighteen musicians. It is published by Unsounds in the form of a book with two CD, but also as an iBook, in english and spanish.
The text was conceived by Reinaldo Laddaga 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 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, Sylvia 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.
Reinaldo Laddaga is the author of eight books and the scripts for two music theater pieces. His latest books (in Spanish) are A Prologue to my Father’s Books, Aesthetics of Laboratory, and Three Secret Lives: John D. Rockefeller, Walt Disney, Osama bin Laden. His latest piece for the stage is Summer Maneuvers (with C. Baroni and F. Marcaccio). He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in New York.
Released in:
2013