The Art Of Sound with _ _ _ _ __ ___ (_) ___| |__ ___| | ___ _ __ ___ ___ _ __ ___ _ _ _ __ ___ | '_ ` _ \| |/ __| '_ \ / _ \ |/ _ \ | '_ ` _ \ / _ \ '__/ __| | | | '__/ _ \ | | | | | | | (__| | | | __/ | __/ | | | | | | __/ | | (__| |_| | | | __/ |_| |_| |_|_|\___|_| |_|\___|_|\___| |_| |_| |_|\___|_| \___|\__,_|_| \___| ___ ___ /\/\/\/ / \_ / \ ________________________________ / \ | ( ) || ( ) | || Roland J U N O 60 || \/\/\\ \ \___/ \___/ ||_______________________________|| \^, ^ \\ | _ ____ | || |..| . | _ _ ..| _ |23| ....|| \ _ \ / |o | -- |o | ||' | |' ''| | | | | | |--| ....|| \___ /\\ | ---- | ||-------------------------------|| ___| |___ |oo[ ][ ] | || o ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| / \'*' / \ |__________| ||||- ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| / \__/ \ ||____||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| /\ /\ /\ \ \ \ /\ /\ /\ /\ / \ \ \ \ \ /\ \ \ \ /\ /\ _______ /\ \ \ \ / \ \ \ \ \ \/ \ \ \ \ \ . /\ \ \_\___ __________ / \ \___ / \ \ \ \ / \ \__\ \ \ / \ \______ ______________/ \_____/ \ \ \ / \___ \ / \______ \ \ / \ \ / \ \ / \ / \ / \/ \/ The North Sea Institute for the Overmind had the pleasure of catching up with minimal synthesist and experimental electronic music pioneer Michele Mercure. Mercure is truly an all-around artist: composer, explorer of sound, visual artist, and film producer. Among several scores for theatre, dance, television, and film, she scored four feature films: Shades of Black (1993), Christmas Dinner (1996), Home (2009), and The Last Horsemen of New York (2018). Her music is interspersed with bold industrial drums, ambient soundscapes, jazzy guitar riffs, eerie voice samples and field recordings, sharp synth melodies and pure minimal wave sounds. Her music is experimental, cinematographic, and boundless. It inspires feelings of wonder. As she prepares for upcoming live performances in the U.S.A. and Europe, Michele shared some insight into her beginnings in music production, her time spent in The Netherlands in the late seventies, her unique recording and sampling techniques and ever-evolving studio gear, cassette tape trading in the 80's, as well as current and future projects. Last month, a curated collection of 19 of Mercure's early compositions from four previously self-released albums: Rogue and Mint (1983), A Cast of Shadows (1984),Dreams Without Dreamers (1985), and Dreamplay (1990) were released on RVUNG Intl'ssister label Freedom to Spend as an anthological retrospective double-LP. Mercure's cult album Eye Chant (1986) was recently re-released in 2017 on the label. 'Electricity runs through everything' 'The computer plays some of it, then I play some of it' - Excerpt from 'An electronumentary' featuring Michele Mercure, Directed by Mary Haverstick (2018) ____ You are described as a synthesist, experimental musician, and you are also a film producer. Are those adjectives accurate, how would you further describe yourself? I describe myself in a variety of ways depending on the day. I think that I am anartist that works with sounds, and much of my sound work is musical, not all of,it, some of it environmental and experiential and ambient. I write electronic music, but I don't just write electronic music, I also play guitar, so some of my music is also guitar based. I like the experimental realm. Sometimes, with various types of music, everything is in a box, everything has to be 4/4, as far as time signatures go. I like to stretch that out a bit, I don't like to keep my work in a box that way. I do like to experiment with all aspects of what I am doing, whether it is time signatures or sounds or textures, all that kind of stuff. Telling a story is important. And, the music can be the kind of music where maybe each person hears a different story, but there is a vibe and an emotion, and a flavour to it, that people can resonate to. When you say 'environmental' – do you mean field recordings? I do work with field recording. I love playing around with that. I like environmental stuff. And I put little bits and pieces of that in my work. I used to make complete environmental recordings but I don't do that so much anymore. Now, I blend a lot different things together to create my story. I notice you used a lot of samples in your early work – as we have heard on the compilation Beside Herself – can you tell us more about that? Yes I love sampling. Sampling now is a little different than what sampling used to be. Sampling used to be a little more difficult. If I think about it, I consider the loops that I made before I had a sampler, that was pretty much sampling, except that you were recording a piece of sound onto tape, and you were are looping it, and using it much the way people use samples now and use loops now. I love creating beats, creating ambiences with loops and with samples. There is so much you can do. You can make it go backwards, you can work it out, you can slow it down, you can speed it up, you can do crazy things with it. It is pretty much a sound that you've mined from the world and now you are using it in something that you are creating. It is very much like an artist creating a painting, except I am working with sound. Where do you get most of your samples? Everywhere. I get them from outside my front door. I get them from sounds at the playground, sounds anywhere, sounds of crickets in the middle of the night, creating sounds by banging on things. Sounds are everywhere. It is just a part of your world, it is a part of your environment, you can get your sound from everywhere. Does that mean you walk around with a field recorded anywhere you go? I do that. Sometimes I use my iphone. I do have a field recorder that I use quite a bit. I have to think what it is.. it is a Sony, it is a really nice stereo recorder...I use that quite a bit. You mentioned that sampling back then used to be quite different than it is now. It was more material and tactile, involved more cutting. Can you tell us more about that? When I did the loops, yes. I had a couple of reel-to-reels that I would use. Back then, I would take reel-to-reel tape, quarter inch tape, and I would record my sound, then I would physically make a loop out of it. Then I would just play the loop through the recorders. Sometimes the loops would stretch from here to the back wall, and back again. That is really long, you get a couple of those going, and add some echo, you've got some crazy stuff happening. And now, I use a sampler. After that, I got an Ensonic mirage sampler – I loved that sampler. You couldn't do really long loops with it, but it had a quality, its an 8-bit sampler, so it kind of crushed everything, and had some artifacts. It had this very interesting warm quality that I absolutely loved. It stopped working, I ended up selling it. Now Iam kicking myself. I should have kept that thing. Now I use a variety of things for loops. I work with Ableton live and Pro Tools audio work stations. I work with both of them depending on what I am doing. I also have a loop station that I use for some live stuff, and for triggering those sounds. So between all of that, I feel that I have every tool imaginable. But I am always looking for more! How did you first get into music production? It was a step at a time. So I really started out when I was a kid being a guitar player. That was – and still is to some extent – my primary instrument. Sometimes I record my parts on guitar and then use Ableton to translate them into midi and then process them that way. But I digress. I started out as a guitar player and also as a visual artist, painting and that kind of stuff. When moving to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I got involved with an artist community of painters and theatre people – not musicians. I became interested in sound as art, at that time. Just being involved with artists who were doing some traditional but especially experimental art, experimental theatre. And I became interested in sound as art. And I started experimenting with tape recorders, cassette recorders, and recording things on cassette, mixing them together. I got some guitar foot pedals, and I thought, how can I mess around with this. That is how I got started, really using sound as my palette; instead of painting a picture, I am painting an environment of sound. One thing led to another and I started to become kind of a geek when it came to gear. So I would get effects, usually used, you know being a starving artist, you have to kind of get what you can. That was how I started as well, just with effects, and with cassette recorders, and with reel-to-reels, sometimes I would borrow things, sometimes I would rent things, to just keep producing and keep experimenting. It is really wonderful when you are that age – which I was about 18 at the time – you don't really know anything. You don't know what the rules are – there are no rules. So you just experiment, you just create, and you get the feedback from your friends, people listen, that's great, and you keep going. It is really a great time. It is really a great time now. But as you get older, some people get their crutches and their ways they have to do things, so it's really good if you can stay open to the process. Do you have tips or tricks when you are looking for inspiration? Like all artists, I think, you have times where you are not feeling quite as inspired, so you have to "trick" yourself. I move the studio around. Sometimes I completely flip it around. Sometimes I put it in a different room. Sometimes, I have my studio here, but I live somewhere else, so sometimes I take all my stuff home. Also, I listen to what other people are doing, and you can get a lot of inspiration from other people, and what they are doing, trying to figure out how they did something, how did they got a certain sounds. It's not going to be exactly the same. You will figure out your way of doing it, but in doing that, you can come up with a whole new process. Sometimes it is as simple as getting a new synthesizer, getting a new guitar. I have five or six guitars, and they all make me play differently. When I play differently, I am inspired to do different things. It is the same thing with synthesizers. That make you play differently, make you do things differently. Sometimes just getting new toys is all you need. There are so many things. Maybe if you are working on something and normally you work on drums first, work on a different thing first – work on a texture, work on your sound. Sometimes your sound can inspire what the rest of the piece is going to be. I read in an interview that you spent time in The Netherlands, that had inspired you in your music; can you tell us a bit more about that? That was probably in the late 1970's, I spent just a little over six months there. I was in Eindhoven. I was already doing music at that time, but I was exposed to things like – there was another person doing electronic music that I met, while I was there, and then there was listening to Radio Free Europe. I don't know what it is like now, because I haven't listened to Radio free Europe in many years, but at the time, I was hearing music that you'd never hear in the United States, and it was from all over the world but it was really some great stuff and I could spend hours listening to that and getting all sorts of ideas, and hearing bands I'd never heard and that just opened my mind up to all the things that I could be doing, and all the things that my music can be. I had been livingin Harrisburg already, I had been living there for probably about a year, and I was already involved in the kind of artist community, it was a very small community. I was already doing my sound experiments. When I went to The Netherlands, I saw that people had been doing this for a while! And it was just wonderful to see and I really felt like that was where actually I belonged. I loved the Netherlands, it was just wonderful. Eindhoven is the birthplace of the cassettetape and CD player. Could you feel that ethos? One of the many things I loved about Eindhoven and The Netherlands in general is that I had a couple record stores that I would go to regularly there and they got to know me and it got to this point where I could go in and I could say, surprise me – I wanted to hear something I'd never heard before. They knew that I was from the United States. It was partly what they gave me to listen to, all of these things, that's how I heard Conrad Schnitzler for the first time, was that I went to this record store and I said: I want to hear something I had never heard before, this is the stuff I am into, but don't put me in that box because I like to hear all kinds of things. It was one of those stores that got me into Conrad Schnitzler and it also brought me to Kate Bush, so there is the spectrum. I read that your first four albums which became the compilation Beside Herself, you self-released and self-distributed them, how did that happen, how did you get them out into the world? When I came back from The Netherlands, I started writing and producing and recording more work. At the same time, I discovered that there were other people who were doing electronic music and experimental music and I found that out because I somehow got a copy of a magazine at the time called – I think it went through a variety of names – there was Tape-Op and then there was Option magazine, and in those magazines there was always a section at the end where they would review people's tapes that were sent in and I realized people are recording their music, they are putting it out, they were getting them reviewed. They would even put our name and address so that people could contact you in they wanted a copy of the tape. There was a lot of trading tapes going on. That's how I met a lot of people that were doing what I was doing. Can you tell us more about trading tapes? For instance, first I found out that other people were producing their music and making a record basically on cassette tape and they were self-distributing it. So that was the first thing I discovered. Then I made my first tape. In one of the magazines, probably Tape-op, I saw that Eurock Distribution was doing some distribution of some people's electronic music on cassette. I contacted them and they agreed to distribute my tape. That's the distribution aspect. But then when you send your tapes to place like Tape-op magazine or Option magazine and it gets reviewed they put your name and address at the end of the review, and other people, if they find your review interesting, they would contact you and say hey! I'm doing this music too, do you want to trade tapes with me? Then, we would trade tapes back and forth and it is kind of how I would meet other people that were doing the same kind of thing I was doing. This was snail mail, everything takes forever to get anywhere. Its not like the Internet, where you are copying files to dropbox. I love the immediacy of the internet I have to say, I love that you and we can have a conversation and you are half way across the world. I am very curious about what you are working on nowadays and what you have been working on. Can you tell us more about your film scoring? I have written music for four feature films. I do music for the projects that we do here, some commercial projects, I've done music for dance and theatre and that kind of thing. It's a little different from my electronica, although some of that is always in there, my sounds. But I am writing music for other people, so you have to work within the confines of what you are writing for demands. I love that aspect too. As a matter of a fact, that's kind of my heart right now. I love writing music for film. Creating that aspect of emotion that you see on the screen. I really love that. Right now what I am doing is, for several years now, I have been involved in a research project that has to do with spying during the cold war. I am creating a whole body of work around the concept and art of spying. It's kind of a concept record. You are working on a concept album? What motivated you to delve into this topic? Yes, absolutely. I have a number of pieces for it. I don't know when it will be done or how long it will be, but I have been working on that. It is a topic that we've been researching loosely for maybe a project down the road for a documentary or something. I just got involved – you never know what it going to inspire you. Some of the stories I was reading just inspired me to explore that, you know there are these things called numbers stations, I don't know if you are familiar with that, they are these shortwave radio stations that spies use for communication and there are all these codes and if you know where to look on short wave radio, you can find these things. So there is the recording of shortwave radio sounds, that is only one aspect of it though. I am just fascinated about that stuff. It seems that you enjoy being commissioned, you mentioned that enjoy writing for performances. Do you have parameters, or do you have carte blanche? It really depends on the project. I love commissions. I love the collaboration, I like the collaborative spirit. Some of my projects, I usually come up with ideas, it has to be a project that I resonate with. I will come up with ideas of what I want to do, kind of a palette of sounds I want to use to create and a director will say yes I like it, or can we go more in this direction, and that kind of thing. Usually I have a lot of leeway and of course when you are collaborating or working on a film, you have to be open to other people's ideas and opinions, and that can often make you do things that you might not normally do and that is actually a good thing. Usually when I get a critique like that, it usually makes the music better. So, I am open. I very much enjoy that type of collaborative work. If you could collaborate on music with anyone, deceased or alive, who would it be? There are people that I absolutely love and adore, and I don't know if I would like to collaborate with them, necessarily. There are people that I just think are fantastic. I have to think about it. One person that I can think of – I think you want to know that you will are going to add your voice, and that it will also come through, for instance, I love Thomas Newman. He is a composer, he did The Adjustment Bureau, American Beauty, and Little Children, he is just phenomenal. I think he would be someone with whom it would fascinating to collaborate with. And also I think that I could find my voice and that it would be an interesting collaboration, or that I like to think it would be a good collaboration. I hope that doesn't sound pretentious! It would be really cool thing. Can you tell us what is in your studio at the moment? It is really stripped down. I am working primarily in Ableton live for music. I just love that program. There is so much you can do with it and so many different ways you can work with it. It is a stable program, I can layer effects and I know it's not going to crash. It is kind of my brain at the moment, if you will, of what I am doing right now. Within Ableton live I also use my APC 40 as a controller, I also use a push as a controller, and for me it's a lot of controllers. I have a Komplete Control A49, those are basically the three things that control my Ableton. Then, I do have a Roland Gaia. I really like Roland synthesizers. I like other types of synths too, but I like the architecture and I like the sound that Roland gets. So I think it is important to, at least for me, to use not just one type of synth, but to have a couple of very different things in your arsenal because the architecture of how sound is made creates the quality – like for instance a Korg doesn't sound anything like a Roland, to me, and so I like having different tools that I can use and mix together. But at the moment I am using a Roland Gaia. I am also using a Korg sampling digital delay that I really love, that is really old school, it is 8-bit. I love it because I can get long 4 second delays with it. So you can do a lot of interesting things. I have a loop station, and I have my guitars. So that's really what I am using right now. Plus a lot of soft synths. ________________________________________________________________ | ______ | || | | - - - - - | || |ensoniq = - - - - - M i r a g e | || |_________| - - - - ________________________________ | ||______| ____________________________________________________ | | --==-- |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| | | - - |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| | | | | | || | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | || | |________|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_||__| You mentioned that you are preparing for some live performances. Where are you performing and what type of live performance? I just started prepping for scheduled performances in New York in Barcelona nd perhaps Montreal. There has been talked of a tour of the UK in September. There is Rewire (In The Hague), but I don't know what is happening though. I had an offer from Rewire (In The Hague ed.) and I said yes! but then I didn't hear anything from them again. The record label emailed and emailed again, but no response. I am not sure what happened. I have a general set list – I am doing three old pieces and the rest is new, and I am doing some improvisational stuff, so it's a combination of things. I am hoping that I can get a visual aspect together as well. It's a tall order because my first show is in February, end of February. But I'd like to see what I can do. I am going to be mixing old and new aspects, even with the visuals. A lot of people do a similar thing, with their visuals, but I want to try to do something a little different. Hopefully I can pull it off, if I can't it may just be music, but I think it may be interesting if it is both. Sometimes, when you're performing electronic music, people can't always tell what you are doing, and it would be a lot more interesting if people had something else to focus on another than me pressing buttons and playing, and not exactly knowing what's going on. Would this visual aspect also be your own work? I think it would be our own work. There may be some things in the public domain that I can loop. There are ways to play loops with the keyboard, and that would be interesting to me, to mess around with that. Since it has always made me a little nervous to have the computer be the brain that is controlling everything, and so, I want to make sure that it is something that is really doable and is stable. That is something that used to plague me all the time when I would play live in the 80's, I would have to say to the audience at the start of the show, "ok, it might crash, and if it does I will start the piece all over again". It used to be quite anxiety provoking. Thank you so much for sharing your insights with us, we truly hope to see you in The Hague and in Europe soon! By Z.Zerfall