Ut Mutem explores parental paranoia on experimental ‘Wet Nurse’


Of all the uniquely specific and wholly individual experiences of life, there may be none more so than parenthood.

No matter what guidelines or methodologies you’re working from, you’re still raising a singular individual human being, and you’re still navigating all of your own thoughts and feelings and worries and fears in constantly new ways that can’t really be explained or quantified.

It’s an experience marked by confusion and defined by trial and error, not by anything established or expected.

So it stands to reason that any artist attempting to express and explore all of the strangeness and confusion and inadequacy wrapped up in new parenthood would do well to shuffle off all the established constraints of popular music and focus instead on capturing that overwhelming, engulfing feeling.

And that’s presumably the aim of “Wet Nurse,” the new full-length album by OKC-based experimental sound artist Ut Mutem that’s set to drop on streaming services and cassette this Friday, December 20th. 

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“Wet Nurse” album art.

It’s a dense, boldly conceived experimental album bursting with that aforementioned strangeness and confusion, but at every turn, it continues inviting the listener forward and dropping breadcrumbs that lead further and further into its hazy, dreamlike world and themes.

Ut Mutem (from the Latin for “to change” or “mutate”) is Andrew Lee, a multi-path conceptual artist with a sandbox that includes video collage, mixed-media physical art, and this, his primary creative outlet of sound experimentation and tape manipulation.

The music of Ut Mutem is most commonly built from heavily deconstructed and affected tape loops, with live performances switching out and manipulating cassettes in real-time.

The creation of “Wet Nurse” was no different, with the majority recorded from fleeting moments of experimental luck.

“As always, the actual inspiration for the recorded sound was almost entirely generated by experimentation with processes, capturing sounds, layering differently sourced audio, etc,” Lee told me ahead of the album’s release. “Each track of the record was recorded in one take, save one, so it was more on-the-spot improvisation with liking how things were going and then hitting record.”

The designator “experimental music” can so often denote something deliberately antagonistic designed to challenge a listener’s own concept of what’s even allowed to be music. It can be off-putting and openly dissonant and will often wear the term “noise” proudly.

But that designation feels wrong for something as gentle and compelling as “Wet Nurse.”

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Andrew Lee of Ut Mutem (photo by Jeff WZ Reed)

There are abrupt stops and clashing, unexpected starts and even disquieting, manipulated voices and what might be far-off human screams, and yet the music never feels like its pushing you away or challenging you. It feels emotional and indefinably conceptual, never self-serving or bloated.

And that’s likely because the themes at play here are very real for Lee, himself a recent father grappling with the exact kind of overwhelming emotions, fears, and considerations that he’s attempting to make audible on the album.

He described the inspiration as “a surreal interpretation of what I was feeling raising twins with my wife” and said that the first inklings of the project began as a potential film experiment before “time and raising actual babies got in the way.”

So he pivoted to expressing the same feelings through audio, and in doing so, created a remarkably organic sonic landscape.

Unlike a majority of ambient music, there’s very little that feels alien or otherworldly in the experimental soundscaping of “Wet Nurse,” with its tonal washes and fly-by sounds evoking less of a distant planet and more of a raw, vulnerable, at times even claustrophobic and half-remembered dream state.

There are plenty of industrial noises – pipes, glass, steam – and unmistakably human elements in voices and breaths. There are even the occasional sounds of stopping, ejecting, and switching out the physical cassettes themselves.

The final song (and Lee does refer to them as “songs”) contains a persistent, barely decipherable audio clip discussing pre-natal imaging and maternity tech, an oddly uncomfortable inclusion that almost feels like the impossible attempt to retain all this procedural information while your mind is racing from the incoming responsibility.

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Ut Mutem’s tape-looping and effects equipment for a performance at the Metropolitan Library System’s Downtown branch for “Library Out Loud” (Photo by Zoe Elrod, courtesy of the Metropolitan Library System)

Of course, with all of its industrial explorations surrounding the creeping paranoia of imminent parenthood, it’s easy to think of “Wet Nurse” as a sound collage companion to David Lynch’s immortal “Eraserhead,” itself arguably a dissection of the feelings of helplessness and confusion of early fatherhood.

Like “Eraserhead,” it’s likely impossible to ever know just how much of that meaning or thematic exploration was intended and how much is simply projection from the audience and interpretation from me right now.

But that’s not the point. The point of “Wet Nurse,” – as with any good, genuinely experimental and indefinable artwork – is that the people that get it will get it, and the people that feel it will get it even more.

“Wet Nurse” by Ut Mutem releases on streaming services, Bandcamp, and cassette on Friday, December 20th with an official album release show (and winter solstice celebration)  the next night at Bookish in OKC.


You can find out about local music and performance happenings in the OKC metro weekly in this music column by Brett Fieldcamp. | Brought to you by True Sky Credit Union.


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Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.