Michele Mercure

CAT #: ReRVNG16 / FTS016
May 8, 2020

Pictures of Echoes is an intimate answer to Beside Herself, the 2018 anthology of music from Michele Mercure’s self-produced and distributed cassettes. Pictures of Echoes picks up where Beside Herself left off, collecting key moments from Mercure’s solo releases and collaborative, cross-disciplinary work, and restoring the recordings for a new digital age while employing the medium which originally transported these sounds.

Surveying the efforts of a decade, from passages of her 1983 debut Rouge & Mint to themes from her score for Mary Haverstick’s 1993 film Shades of Black, Pictures places brooding instrumental sketches next to ceremonious and cinematic compositions, sculpted from an arsenal of beloved synthesizers, drum machines, and samplers, live acoustic accompaniments, and her trusty Atari ST.

Pictures of Echoes is a word painting for the technological transposition from analogue memory into digital collection, a process of reimagining the past and giving new life to earlier work. Mercure’s creative evolution has been led by loyalty to homespun and DIY practices, to self and collaborative production and the embrace of eccentricity and unorthodoxy.

Finding a foundation on the fringe, her work merges sound and image in the site of community, composing music for films, dance collaborations and avant garde theater productions as well as her own editions. Projects from each of these corners are present in this supplementary survey, which moves from counter Kosmische to experimental expressionism.

Available as a cassette or digital experience under the joint RVNG and Freedom to Spend banner, Pictures of Echoes is an integral part of the mercurial journey through Michele’s archive, which began with FTS’s 2017 reissue of Eye Chant, the label’s inaugural release.