There’s a Mystery In Your Hearsay

by Blind Mime Ensemble VS

Inspired by the recordings of Mike Honeycutt (Mystery Hearsay)

Lyric and music by Briyan Frederick

Briyan Frederick: sampling, synthesizer, percussion, vocals
Sunoai: Additional instruments and vocals

Mixed and Engineered by Sunoai

Mastered for digital by Briyan Frederick

Mike Honeycutt was a pioneering figure in the DIY cassette culture and an influential experimental musician from Memphis. He gained prominence through his alias Mystery Hearsay, producing avant-garde electronic music and being deeply involved in the underground music scene. His work spanned decades, starting in the 1980s, and he was known for his innovative contributions to experimental sound and the cassette culture movement, which offered a raw, non-commercial alternative to mainstream music.

Honeycutt was also a radio host on WEVL Memphis, where he curated experimental soundscapes on his show Audio Exotica. Throughout his career, he collaborated with many other experimental musicians and was involved in various projects like Larb and MHZ, helping to build a significant body of work in the experimental music scene. His influence extended beyond Memphis, reaching underground music communities worldwide.

He passed away in late 2023, leaving behind a legacy that is celebrated by fellow musicians and experimental music enthusiasts alike. Numerous tributes have been organized in his honor, recognizing his substantial contributions to the world of experimental music and sound art

International Union of Mail-Artists

Base Records).

There's a mystery in your hearsay
Now spoken from the past
The mystery, I dare say
Why some things die too fast

There's a mystery in your hearsay
And the garden's overgrown
There's mystery in the magic
That all your seeds have sown

Oh, Michael, Oh Michael
What does it mean?
Oh, Michael, Oh Michael
The mystery in your hearsay
Is a mystery to me

When the mystery in your hearsay
Reveals itself at last
The tapes will all unravel
The capstans grind to rust

If this sounds too exotic
While the audio larbs and moans
It's nothing but a mystery
As its hearsay still unfolds

Oh, Michael, Oh Michael
What does it mean?
Oh, Michael, Oh Michael
The mystery in your hearsay
Is a mystery to me

There's a mystery in your hearsay
And the garden's overgrown
There's mystery in the magic
That all your seeds have sown

Oh, Michael, Oh Michael
What does it mean?
Oh, Michael, Oh Michael
The mystery in your hearsay
Is a mystery to me

Oh, Michael, Oh Michael
The mystery in your hearsay
Is a mystery to me


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Blind Mime Ensemble is a multimedia art project by Briyan Frederick.

Blind Mime Ensemble is virtually fronted by Riyan and Freyd, two enigmatic, mimes who navigate a surreal, ever-shifting world of sound, silence, and absurdity. Their blindness is fluid—sometimes self-imposed, sometimes real, sometimes performative—as they search for meaning, expression, and each other in an evolving landscape of experimental and electronic pop music, visual storytelling, and conceptual art.

Their performances blur the lines between dreams and reality, chaos and order, seeing and unseeing.

Blind Mime Ensemble VS is a secondary project where BME creates albums from audio seeded from other artists, Tapegerms, videos, found recordings and more. It’s more experimental glitchy electronic and explores the boundaries of modern composition with AI and other methods.

Blind Mime Ensemble Variations  is where we explore variations of found sounds, art and maybe other things. These explorations result in album-length pieces. Send us something for us to into something new.

You can find Briyan Frederick‘s home and studio recordings at briyanfrederick.bandcamp.com.

AI Soundoff is Briyan’s blog, vlog and podcast about AI Music creativity and industry.

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