Alison Mutha Magazine Article ((new)) -

There’s a particular kind of quiet that lives in the canyons of Topanga, California. It’s the sound of chaparral brushing against denim, the low hum of a vintage amplifier warming up, and the soft scratch of a charcoal stick on recycled paper. For , 34, that quiet isn’t an absence of noise. It’s a presence. It’s a choice.

Alison Mutha’s memoir, “The Third Setting,” is available for preorder now. Her show “A Kindness of Crows” runs Nov. 15–Jan. 10 at Regen Projects, Los Angeles. alison mutha magazine article

For the last decade, Mutha has been the best-kept secret of the Los Angeles underground—a polymath who refuses to be polymathic. “The moment you call yourself a multi-hyphenate,” she says, sipping cold brew from a ceramic mug that looks like it was thrown by a potter who was very angry at the universe, “you stop being an artist and start being a brand. I’d rather just be late to my own dinner party.” There’s a particular kind of quiet that lives

That dinner party, as it happens, is the subject of her upcoming memoir, The Third Setting (out next spring from Tiny Reparations Books). Part recipe collection, part philosophical treatise on creative burnout, and part love letter to her late grandmother—a Tamil mathematician who taught her how to fold samosas and fractals with equal precision—the book is as unclassifiable as Mutha herself. Born in suburban Maryland to an Indian-American cardiologist and a Jewish folk musician from the Bronx, Mutha grew up in a house where a discussion about the Bohr model of the atom could segue into a Dixieland jazz session. “My father wanted me to be a surgeon,” she laughs. “My mother wanted me to be Joan Baez. They compromised by buying me a secondhand Moog synthesizer and a scalpel. I was the only 12-year-old at the science fair who could dissect a frog and score the procedure in D minor.” It’s a presence

Her next project? A graphic novel with no words, set entirely in a single elevator. A fragrance line based on the smell of a library after a rainstorm. And, improbably, a documentary about competitive whistling.