Mutant Forest is the creative vehicle for Brooklyn based artists Blue and Andrew Maeve. Together they draw from a wide palette of creative interests and impulses which are cleverly incorporated into their imminent release Bound.
“Bound fantasizes an ideal attraction. We’ve both had a lot of dating experiences where at first we’re swimming in the nre, but as things go deeper the facade begins to crack exposing things that were hidden or that we’d chosen to ignore,” explains Andrew.
“Bound imagines someone that strikes that perfect balance of allure and intrigue”. On writing the track, Andrew recalls “I’m always searching for sounds that trigger a deep emotional resonance. At some point this broody bouncing bassline and beat came together and I could feel my whole body tingling. I take that as a signal from my subconscious that this sound captures something I’ve experienced that only music can articulate.”
Mutant Forests language is communicated through music, new media design, and dance, merging to weave others into immersive experiences. These inclinations started to take shape when they were invited to present a series of work at the Museum of Arts and History in Santa Cruz, CA.
The first project was a sound print machine using cymatics and marbling paint to capture unique sound patterns. Later they shared a piece that used EEG to detect guests’ brainwaves and transduce them to corresponding sounds and colors.
This is just the start for Mutant Forest. With their clinically clear vision and a thrivingly dark aesthetic the journey ahead for the creative will be as bold as the statement they are currently making.
Paint us a portrait of Mutant Forest
We both have a wide breadth of creative interests. I’m really into photography and video, as well as using technology to build interactive art installations. Blue likes anything that involves moving their body, which for them lately is intuitive movement, aerial, and shibari. Music became this binding force that could string all of our interests together into a full bodied creative world.
How many hours a day do you spend making music?
I used to think I had to spend the whole day working on music, but lately I’ve found that if I put myself in a flow state I can accomplish in 2-3 hours what used to take all day. There’s so much more to this game than just making music it doesn’t feel feasible for that to be the sole focus without a full creative team backing you. Thankfully we really enjoy the other creative aspects, so we spend the rest of our time creating microcosms around each song, finding visual metaphors that resonate with the music and turning those into photoshoots, and music videos, a lot of which we shoot and edit ourselves.
Who are your all time musical icons?
I grew up listening to a lot of shoegaze. I have distinct memories as a young child of driving through LA highways at night with my dad listening to My Bloody Valentine. I think that feeling of floating through the dark in that full immersive sound really stuck with me.
What are some things to do to keep your inspiration alive?
I pay attention to my feelings, music seems to be the only way I can process some of the intangible emotions I have, so as long as I’m in touch with myself then there’s always something to express. The broader arts scene in New York is a constant source of inspiration as well, from the grimy diy spaces in Brooklyn to the shiny galleries in Manhattan, I truly love it all.
Who are you binge listening to these days?
Deconstructed Club is a pretty fun genre, WWWINGS is great so is Amnesia Scanner. Also recently got into Shostakovich. Symphony No5 op.47 III is amazing, imagine making something that full of defiant anguish even after falling out of favor with Stalin’s regime for your previous work not being optimistic enough. The audience cried at its premiere because it captured so much feeling that they couldn’t express without risking death, I love that.
Favorite movie or TV show?
A24 keeps putting out the hits, they’ve made a lot of our recent favorites Parasite, Suspiria. Miranda July’s Kajillionaire it’s amazing. We also recently rewatched Gremlins, it holds up lol. But also Adventure Time, for the feels.
Tell us about your latest release and how it came about
Bound came about from an exploratory session in our Brooklyn studio, which just involves trying lots of ideas until something hits. Eventually this broody bouncing bassline and beat came together which got my whole body feeling tingly. I take those body signals as a sign that I’ve struck upon a complicated feeling that only music can properly express.
In experimenting with different lyrical ideas a line came up that captured the essence of the song, “the less I know the more I like you”. I associated this with some of the recent relationships I’d been in, the kind that start out with a lot of rosey nre, but all the same just have no real depth, and as things go on the feelings fade. Which leaves me thinking “I liked you better when I didn’t know you that well.” So it grew into an exploration of compulsive attraction, and hidden personalities.
Do you have any peculiar pre or post show rituals?
Preshow is just a lot of self care, stay hydrated, stretch and save your energy. We like riding the post show elation into conversations with other artists and audience, it’s the best environment to make new connections in, we’re all immersed in something we love.
What’s the future looking like for you?
We want to design a performance that has an interactive art installation embedded in it as a means of finding new ways to both create sound and represent it visually.
Who inspires your style and aesthetics?
We try to draw a lot of our visual identity from a particular song that we’re creating around, we like to search for symbols and visual metaphors that amplify the songs emotional resonance, so that ends up defining the aesthetic. If we had the budget thought I think we’d be modeling early Lady Gaga, in her constant state of mutation.
Our recent inspirations are somewhere between Rick Owens, James Turrell and Bart Hess.
What is the achievement or moment in your career you are the most proud of and why?
When we got invited to do a performance and build an installation at O+ festival. They gave us this massive abandoned theatre to use, and after a week of 16 hour days we more or less pulled it off. That project captures the essence of the shows we’d love to do in the future.
What is your advice for aspiring artists that want to achieve what you achieved?
Don’t do everything yourself. Find people to help you do the things you’re no good at. Think who can help me do this, instead of how am I going to do all this.
What would you change in the music and entertainment industry especially after this past year?
So much of this game is about understanding how to cater to algorithms. Some people are really good at that, but there are a lot of really talented voices that get lost because they don’t know how to create the kind of content that gets rewarded in a particular system. It begs the question, how much art is being created just to perform optimally in an algorithm that was designed to harness as much attention as possible? I’d love to see a shift in these systems that incentivized creating work that feels authentic to each individual artist.
