Speaker 1: Ephemeral is a production of I Heart three D audio
Speaker 1: for full exposure. Listen with that phones what It is
Speaker 1: said that every artist has their patron Orpheus had the
Speaker 1: mused Calliope. Mozart had Emperor Joseph the Second Too many
Speaker 1: nos just developed Underground had Andy Warhol. But for many creators,
Speaker 1: the only opportunity to share their art with the world
Speaker 1: is to do everything with themselves. Self produce, self release,
Speaker 1: self distribute. Today we bring you the stories of three
Speaker 1: musicians not propelled by any commission, only their drive to create.
Speaker 1: This also marks the return of our friend Matt Worth,
Speaker 1: a proprietor of Revenge RVNG International, which sought these artists,
Speaker 1: sound tracked their music down years after the initial release,
Speaker 1: and reintroduced it to the world up first. Michelle Mercure,
Speaker 1: I'm Michelle Mercure. I live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and I
Speaker 1: make electronic music, among other things. I grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Speaker 1: Always loved music and was very interested in all of
Speaker 1: the ways that you could manipulate sound. I was listening
Speaker 1: to people who were experimenting with samplers at the time.
Speaker 1: Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, conren Schnitzler craft work, John Cage,
Speaker 1: and the residents of the Residents seven thirty coach for
Speaker 1: some of the Easton Harris I moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Speaker 1: for a relationship when I was like I don't know eighteen.
Speaker 1: The people that I was meeting and the people that
Speaker 1: I was associating with were more theater people, visual artists
Speaker 1: and poets, not so much musicians. I think that really
Speaker 1: colored where I went musically, merging music and art. Music
Speaker 1: and art. Back in nineteen eight one or so, I
Speaker 1: started writing isn't quite the right word. So I started
Speaker 1: experimenting with found sounds tape recorders, and then started using
Speaker 1: synthesizers and making art out of sound. There was an
Speaker 1: experimental theater company in Harrisburg called the Commonwealth Stage Company.
Speaker 1: They were doing a very experimental version of Beckett's Waiting
Speaker 1: for God, Oh nothing to be Done. I'm beginning to
Speaker 1: come around to that opinion, and they asked me to
Speaker 1: create the music, which was more like a sound environment.
Speaker 1: That was my first foray into scoring and creating environments,
Speaker 1: and doing that one show was monumental in my creative development.
Speaker 1: From Michelle, A new piece of music can originate in
Speaker 1: many different places. Sometimes it starts as an experiment, and
Speaker 1: sometimes I have an idea in my mind. I had
Speaker 1: a reel to reel that I use a lot of
Speaker 1: times for a foundation, making tape loops, making a rhythm,
Speaker 1: taking dialog from a crazy television show, Batman, the News,
Speaker 1: the Bus of the Future, some of the religious programming
Speaker 1: at the time. I would layer them, put them through filters,
Speaker 1: mangling and playing it back akwards, playing at a different speed,
Speaker 1: and then wanting to add more musicality your career coming
Speaker 1: to your career coming. I was very into seeing what
Speaker 1: I could do with minimal equipment and also cheap equipment,
Speaker 1: very low fi. At one time I had one of
Speaker 1: those realistic synthesizers. It was a radio shack. That's geody.
Speaker 1: They'll tell you where there's a radio shaxpol but it
Speaker 1: was designed by mog. I had little Casio rhythm maker,
Speaker 1: the electro Harmonics micro synth. I ran my guitar through,
Speaker 1: or ran other things through. Then I became kind of
Speaker 1: a gear freak. Yeah, if you look at pictures of
Speaker 1: Michelle from the eighties, she's invariably buried behind towering racks
Speaker 1: of keyboards, effects students, mixers, and electronic odds and ends.
Speaker 1: I see you have your computer linked to the telephone line.
Speaker 1: Can you tell us how you did that? She would
Speaker 1: combine these elements by recording herself on tape cassette like
Speaker 1: a one woman orchestra, overdubbing as she went. I had
Speaker 1: two set recorders and a small little mixer. I would
Speaker 1: record onto one cassette, bounce everything, and record the next
Speaker 1: track onto the other cassette. And I bounced back and forth,
Speaker 1: adding tracks as I went. And then if itig got
Speaker 1: two noisy, I'd know I had to stop because of
Speaker 1: the noise floor. Your first couple of releases were done
Speaker 1: like that. In Michelle self released her first tape. The
Speaker 1: first tape was called Rouge and Mint. I find some
Speaker 1: of it to be a bit cringe worthy right now,
Speaker 1: but you know, it's where I was at the time.
Speaker 1: We can often be our own harshest critics. The wonderful
Speaker 1: thing I think about the early work is that there
Speaker 1: was no self censoring. Everything was I'm just gonna play
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna see what happens, and I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: put it all out there. At first, when I put
Speaker 1: that tape out It was really just because I wanted
Speaker 1: to meet more people who were doing the kind of
Speaker 1: work that I was doing. I felt like I was
Speaker 1: on a little island in Harrisburg. There was a magazine
Speaker 1: at the time called Option. People would send their music
Speaker 1: in to be reviewed. At the end of each review,
Speaker 1: they would put a person's address, putting the address in
Speaker 1: the center of the envelope and the return address in
Speaker 1: the upper left hand corner. If the review interested you,
Speaker 1: you could contact them and you could buy their tape
Speaker 1: or seefl trade tapes. I'm writing to you because I
Speaker 1: know you'll understand. So I thought, well, let me try this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let me just try this, Kathy and put it on
Speaker 1: and I put it in. Remember to put your return
Speaker 1: address and ZIP code on the letter. It got a
Speaker 1: good review, which surprised me but pleased me. Oh boy,
Speaker 1: thank you. Then I decided to do another one another.
Speaker 1: The second one was a Cast of Shadows, and then
Speaker 1: Dreams Without Dreamers, and tried to put something out every year,
Speaker 1: made anywhere from at the most two copies and at
Speaker 1: the least fifty. I think her first cassette she maybe
Speaker 1: even made less. It was always a very small release
Speaker 1: by about the third tape. I started using a computer
Speaker 1: and recording. MIDI media is a digital language. Since an
Speaker 1: audio device is used to communicate using computer language, the
Speaker 1: composer is telling the computer what kind of sounds he wants.
Speaker 1: That allowed me to play a lot of stuff live.
Speaker 1: The computer can help manipulate this melody in many ways.
Speaker 1: Because I could have some MIDI stuff going, I could
Speaker 1: do some tape loops, and I could play as well.
Speaker 1: I at the time was very introverted. I wanted to perform,
Speaker 1: but I was also very nervous because I had racks
Speaker 1: of stuff and a lot of gear. I ended up
Speaker 1: performing with my back to the audience. One thing that
Speaker 1: I used to do I would drape very thick, clear
Speaker 1: plastic so that the audience could sort of see me,
Speaker 1: but not exactly, and then as I would play, I
Speaker 1: would cut out pieces of the plastic to reveal what
Speaker 1: was happening inside. One of the reasons that I didn't
Speaker 1: do a lot of live performances is because back then,
Speaker 1: at least my system wasn't super stable. You could be
Speaker 1: playing and it's all going well, and then all of
Speaker 1: a sudden. Even though her shows were limited and the
Speaker 1: distribution for herself release cassettes was narrow. Michelle's music began
Speaker 1: to garner attention. Six I got a grant from Pennsylvania
Speaker 1: Council in the Arts and the Painted Bride Arts Center
Speaker 1: here in Philadelphia to put out my first vinyl, which
Speaker 1: was I Chant, I right right. I. In that progression
Speaker 1: from the first cassette to eye Chant, my gear grew exponentially.
Speaker 1: They Roland you know, sixty was really my baby at
Speaker 1: the time. I love that since the Insnic Mirage was
Speaker 1: my sampler. It's an a bit sampler, so easy to use.
Speaker 1: I love that sampler. But I felt that it was
Speaker 1: important to have not just all Roland stuff, not just
Speaker 1: all Cord stuff, not just all Yamaha, because their architecture
Speaker 1: is different, so the depths of their sounds are different.
Speaker 1: It's a little like when you're making a stew. You
Speaker 1: want all these different tastes so that what you're making
Speaker 1: tastes complex. I Michelle self released dream Play. I went
Speaker 1: back to cassette. I started working with a great fretless
Speaker 1: bass player. Just love the emotion that a good fretless
Speaker 1: bass player can bring to music. Every time I worked
Speaker 1: with somebody new, my playing sort of changes. I don't
Speaker 1: do it consciously, but I find myself writing music that
Speaker 1: will be enhanced by their playing. I started using more piano,
Speaker 1: and I started using more organic instruments along with the
Speaker 1: electronic stuff. After that, I started just doing a lot
Speaker 1: of work for film, for television, for theater. I did
Speaker 1: some dance scores. In the mid nineties, scored a film
Speaker 1: called Shades of Black. My partner and I we started
Speaker 1: a film company I produced with her and Chad Taylor.
Speaker 1: The film Home stars Marsha gay Harden. There are moments
Speaker 1: frozen Underglass here in my Mind two thousand and eight
Speaker 1: that came out. I also did the music for that.
Speaker 1: Really proud of and heal the cracks and crazes and
Speaker 1: imperfections in my love until I have made it perfect,
Speaker 1: maybe even just a part of me. One thing that
Speaker 1: seems to make Michelle such a prolific composer is her
Speaker 1: practical approach to the creative process. When I get into
Speaker 1: that space, I lose all sense of time. When it's
Speaker 1: really productive, it just feels so good. It's like church.
Speaker 1: But sometimes I would just spin my wheels. You're trying
Speaker 1: to find a sound, and there's so many options you
Speaker 1: can get lost in all the variations that a piece
Speaker 1: could be. For me, I put limitations on myself. If
Speaker 1: I find that I'm going down that rabbit hole, well
Speaker 1: I'll give myself a time limit, or I'll give myself
Speaker 1: an assignment. Those can be really good habits, especially for
Speaker 1: a creative person. I like to work with a palette
Speaker 1: of sounds. Make something out of this instead of the
Speaker 1: wide open field, which sometimes becomes a log jam in
Speaker 1: my mind. You can add other things for color and
Speaker 1: a little bit of icing on the cake, but as
Speaker 1: far as your main ingredients, it's good to have a foundation.
Speaker 1: It could be simply using an instrument that you've never
Speaker 1: used before, or like my first instrument is guitar, and
Speaker 1: I play guitar completely differently than I would play keyboards,
Speaker 1: so you get a whole different kind of musicality that way.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you can be your own worst enemy. You get
Speaker 1: stuck on what's got to be good. As soon as
Speaker 1: you get into that mindset, you stopped playing, you stop
Speaker 1: having fun. It's okay to make mistakes. It's good to
Speaker 1: make mistakes. Matt Worth first encountered Michelle's work when an
Speaker 1: album cover caught his eye. I was introduced to Michelle
Speaker 1: ma Cure's music through eye Chant, one of these records
Speaker 1: with an incredible cover Michelle wearing a hat disguising her facade,
Speaker 1: and then on the back of picture of her face
Speaker 1: and she's holding an eyeball in her mouth. It's pretty
Speaker 1: hard to pass up a record that has those elements.
Speaker 1: Several years later, my buddies Pete swans And and Jed
Speaker 1: Binderman wanted to start a new record label, and that
Speaker 1: was the first release that we democratically decided on reissuing.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm, I'm proud that labeled an imprint of Revenge
Speaker 1: called Freedom to Spend was one of several entities with
Speaker 1: a new interest in the Shell's back catalog. About three
Speaker 1: years ago, labels all over the world started contacting me
Speaker 1: to re release eye Chant, and I really had no
Speaker 1: clue why. I didn't know that people were starting to
Speaker 1: listen to all of this old music, and way back
Speaker 1: when in the eighties, I wasn't sure if anybody was listening.
Speaker 1: I honestly don't know what sparked it, but it was
Speaker 1: one summer I would get a pin and then I
Speaker 1: would see, that's weird, somebody wants to re release I Chant.
Speaker 1: About three weeks later, I would get an email, or
Speaker 1: I would get a Facebook message, or I would get
Speaker 1: a Twitter thing as somebody else is asking about it.
Speaker 1: And then Revenge contacted me, and I was like, okay,
Speaker 1: let's talk because I listened to people who are on
Speaker 1: the label and they just put out great music. So
Speaker 1: I felt like I was going to be in a
Speaker 1: really good company. With a reimagined cover and liner notes,
Speaker 1: I Chant was reissued and its entirety thirty year after
Speaker 1: the original release. The reaction to the rerelease of I
Speaker 1: Chant was very good. These re releases are meant to
Speaker 1: be small runs, they're not meant to just go on
Speaker 1: and on and on. But actually it's sold out very quickly.
Speaker 1: And they made another pressing and that's sold out very quickly.
Speaker 1: And even before that came out, they were talking to
Speaker 1: me about Beside Herself. We naturally gravitated towards her other
Speaker 1: music and asked her if we could compile the music
Speaker 1: of her self released cassettes. They said, we would like
Speaker 1: to do an anthology of like all your work, can
Speaker 1: you just put everything together? I thought to myself, I
Speaker 1: don't even know where everything is, but I had the
Speaker 1: four tapes. I had actually one of each, and then
Speaker 1: I had some dats, and I had bits and pieces
Speaker 1: of things, and then they'd put it together. Assembling the
Speaker 1: collection that would become beside herself posed a series of
Speaker 1: technical challenges. A lot of these cassettes were recorded on
Speaker 1: consumer grade four track, like a task am, so the
Speaker 1: master tape became usually a consumer grade cassette. Michelle would
Speaker 1: use that to duplicate the cassettes. So this master was
Speaker 1: being worn over and over and over again, and that's
Speaker 1: what we had to work with. There are some places
Speaker 1: that we just could not work out the warble, and
Speaker 1: it's very much there. Some people will inevitably ask like, well,
Speaker 1: why would you put that on vinyl if it was
Speaker 1: clearly intended for tape. That's a really good question. What
Speaker 1: is the value of re contextualizing this music that maybe
Speaker 1: wasn't intended for the format, be it vinyl, streaming, c
Speaker 1: D whatever. The drive for us is translating more to
Speaker 1: the experience than the physical medium. So there's the story.
Speaker 1: There are the winer notes, there are the photos, there
Speaker 1: are the posters. All the ephemeral value collected into this
Speaker 1: greater sum, and that for us justifies what would otherwise
Speaker 1: have been an extravagant decision by Michelle to press a
Speaker 1: thousand or two thousand double LPs in the eighties. Matt
Speaker 1: and his team curated Beside Herself as a non linear
Speaker 1: journey through one decade of Michelle's self released work. I
Speaker 1: let the guys from Revenge put the collection together, and
Speaker 1: then they said, well, we like this batch. What do
Speaker 1: you think? And I'm really glad that I did it
Speaker 1: that way, because there were pieces that I might not
Speaker 1: have included on this. I don't listen back to my
Speaker 1: own music very often, and I feel like I would
Speaker 1: probably censor too much. Some of the music was done
Speaker 1: in the very early eighties, and then some of the
Speaker 1: music was done in the early nineties, so the quality
Speaker 1: got so much better, and also my musicality got more intricate.
Speaker 1: I see the value in how they curated it, and
Speaker 1: I'm very pleased with the pieces that they've chosen. The
Speaker 1: exposure from these new releases has altered the trajectory of
Speaker 1: Michelle's career. Last year, for the first time in thirty years,
Speaker 1: I started performing again. It's really all Matt from Revengeance false.
Speaker 1: He said, you know, you really should play live. People
Speaker 1: would really like to hear you play. And I was like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, I haven't played live in thirty years.
Speaker 1: But he put that bug in my head. I thought, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: let me take some time to figure out how I
Speaker 1: would do it, because I wasn't really writing music with
Speaker 1: live performance in mind. But I took a series of
Speaker 1: months and I put the music together in a kind
Speaker 1: of show form, and then I got okay, well, maybe
Speaker 1: I can do this. It was a huge leap of faith.
Speaker 1: Really played a very small show in Lancaster, where I live,
Speaker 1: then played my very first show in New York at Roulette,
Speaker 1: and I did a series of shows all over the world,
Speaker 1: and the rest is history. I really like playing live
Speaker 1: much more now than I did back thirty years ago.
Speaker 1: My equipment is much more stable, so I could really
Speaker 1: get into playing and not worry about whether or not
Speaker 1: something was going to go wrong. While working with Revenge,
Speaker 1: Michelle has also devised some new plans for the future.
Speaker 1: Since Beside Herself came out, there's a real genuine response
Speaker 1: to activating that older music and showcasing her new music.
Speaker 1: I've played about the old music, and about seventy of
Speaker 1: it was current work that hasn't been released yet. I've
Speaker 1: been writing this music for a long time. I just
Speaker 1: kind of keep hoarding it. It's got a concept. It
Speaker 1: has to do with spying during the Cold War. Tell
Speaker 1: types are dead. All we can do now is wait
Speaker 1: the history of the late fifties, sixties, in the seventies,
Speaker 1: that time of space rockets and spying. I've changed a lot.
Speaker 1: My way of working is different, and I think my
Speaker 1: work is different completely, but the music still feels like me. Ye.
Speaker 1: Back around the time Michelle was getting started on her
Speaker 1: second self release, another tape based artist appeared on the
Speaker 1: l a scene introducing the world to a woman of mr.
Speaker 1: How do you like to introduce spread woman if someone's
Speaker 1: never heard of her? I wouldn't just play the music.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think the music says everything. The music
Speaker 1: and the character came together and they evolved over a
Speaker 1: long period of time. I'm Anna Hommler. I'm a vocalist
Speaker 1: who evolved from being a performance artist, who evolved from
Speaker 1: being a visual artist. I studied performance art for many
Speaker 1: years with Rachel Rosenthal, and my backgrounds actually an anthropology
Speaker 1: that evolution from visual artist singer began suddenly in a
Speaker 1: form akin to an epiphany. I was driving through Chapangan
Speaker 1: Canyon for the first time, and I just spontaneously started
Speaker 1: singing these chants. They weren't in English, but the chance
Speaker 1: seemed very familiar to me, and I recorded them in
Speaker 1: a little cassette player I had with me. These little
Speaker 1: song fragments would come when I was doing dishes. They
Speaker 1: were just with me all the time, like sonic wallpaper.
Speaker 1: I taped over whatever cassettes I had and just collected
Speaker 1: them like a good anthropologist. So I had drawers and
Speaker 1: drawers of cassettes with song fragments. The bread Woman language
Speaker 1: had no etymology to it. It was its own free
Speaker 1: form experience, like suddenly she was speaking in tongues. I
Speaker 1: think of it like Hawaiian. You know, twelve letters in
Speaker 1: the alphabet, just a very simple melodic language. I can't
Speaker 1: write it down. I couldn't give you directions to the airport,
Speaker 1: but I could describe the flight. I couldn't order pizza,
Speaker 1: but I could describe feeling. We have levels of consciousness,
Speaker 1: We have levels of awareness and levels of being that
Speaker 1: are more subtle than just our third dimensional bodies. I
Speaker 1: think if you're in tune with that you find all
Speaker 1: these different fluctuations within yourself. So for me, the language
Speaker 1: came not from somewhere else, but it came from inside me.
Speaker 1: I didn't construct a language. I found a language. Though.
Speaker 1: She was taken with inspiration, and I wasn't really sure
Speaker 1: what to do with these songs fragments until she met
Speaker 1: composer Steve Mosher. When I met Steve Moser, I played
Speaker 1: the fragments for him and he selected the ones that
Speaker 1: he wanted to work with. He was teaching at Fullerton
Speaker 1: College and we would work in the school's studio there
Speaker 1: on holidays, so like fourth or July, everyone would be
Speaker 1: doing fireworks, we would be working on bread Woman. He
Speaker 1: would find background sounds, stretch them out, and arrange the
Speaker 1: chance in an electronic environment. He gave her more presents,
Speaker 1: made her less raw, like she was a jewel. He
Speaker 1: put her in a setting, and I was always annoyed
Speaker 1: with me because I was singing between notes. At that time,
Speaker 1: I didn't think of myself as a singer. I was
Speaker 1: a visual and performance artist. I didn't even know what
Speaker 1: notes were or where they were. So he was a
Speaker 1: great education for me. The music is very minimal produced
Speaker 1: with synthesizer, drum machine, and Anna's vocals, sometimes alone, sometimes doubled.
Speaker 1: It feels ancient and future at the same time, both
Speaker 1: alienating and also super attractive. One of those frightening performances
Speaker 1: that you gravitate towards. To me, they conjure up different environments,
Speaker 1: their atmospheres. Yeah, for Anna, it soon became clear that
Speaker 1: alongside the language and music a character was forming, there
Speaker 1: were a lot of different elements that were happening at
Speaker 1: the same time, and eventually I could see that they
Speaker 1: all belonged together. It was like there was a spirit
Speaker 1: or there was a being, and she just needed a body,
Speaker 1: and her body was bread. I was looking for a
Speaker 1: bread woman, but I couldn't locate her in Western culture.
Speaker 1: Through research, I found corn maidens, I found demeter, I
Speaker 1: found a lot of different myths, but I didn't find
Speaker 1: a bread woman per se. And then I happened to
Speaker 1: read a book called Symposium of the Whole, which was
Speaker 1: kind of anthropoetics, and in it there was an article
Speaker 1: about Alta ringa, the Aboriginal concept of the dreaming. In
Speaker 1: the dreaming, ancestors live and the stories and the songs live.
Speaker 1: I thought, oh, bred woman she's in the realm of ancestors,
Speaker 1: stories and songs. Then I felt at peace with her.
Speaker 1: I understood what she was and where she was. I
Speaker 1: imagine she's the first and the last of an ancient race,
Speaker 1: and she's an observer of human events who lives in
Speaker 1: the center of the earth. There's no time in her world.
Speaker 1: She's timeless and eternal. In the mid eighties, Anna started
Speaker 1: performing live as bread Woman. When there's a performance, it's
Speaker 1: more three dimensional, of course, and then you're inviting people
Speaker 1: into that realm. We always start the bread Woman performance
Speaker 1: outside under a tree with her head covered like she's sleeping,
Speaker 1: and then the very slow revealing of her face. And
Speaker 1: bread Woman's face is made of bread. In the beginning,
Speaker 1: it was bread, but bread gets hard after about three days.
Speaker 1: So bread Woman has had several masks, different puff tacks,
Speaker 1: paper machee to look like bread. And I used to
Speaker 1: wear like a kind of grandma dress, and it makes
Speaker 1: bread Woman look like a peasant. She wore these masks
Speaker 1: of bread and this garb out in public places in
Speaker 1: l A, performing more or less like a statue. I
Speaker 1: didn't move that much. I would communicate with hand gestures,
Speaker 1: and I had flower sifters, so the ground would become
Speaker 1: white like snow. Quite a site, I'm sure for anyone
Speaker 1: that was walking by. A lot of times people are
Speaker 1: kind of dazed during a dream state, but usually they
Speaker 1: get into the mood of it. They go to a
Speaker 1: different place than like three D reality, do you know,
Speaker 1: Like that's my goal to move people. The world is
Speaker 1: built on resonance, frequencies, vibration, sound waves. It's all about
Speaker 1: what you resonate with, what nourishes you. And that's what
Speaker 1: I've always thought about the Bread music in the Bread
Speaker 1: language is that it's very authentic and it's very nourishing,
Speaker 1: and that's why people connect to it. It's not from
Speaker 1: your left brain, it's from your intuition. The recorded collaboration
Speaker 1: with Steve Mosher was ready for release. Eventually we had
Speaker 1: five songs that we released on cassette, and a self
Speaker 1: manufactured those cassettes and then sent them through a small
Speaker 1: distribution service. This is pretty common for a lot of
Speaker 1: underground artists at the time, but you're probably not producing
Speaker 1: more than two hundred cassettes. The network was to other musicians, certainly,
Speaker 1: and then if you were lucky, a magazine or two
Speaker 1: would write about it. One outlet for the bread Woman cassette.
Speaker 1: This high performance magazine. High Performance was the bedrock of
Speaker 1: performance art. I believe it's the collector's item. Now. There
Speaker 1: were critical reviews. Performance artists would write articles. A couple
Speaker 1: of times they did series of sound works by performance artists,
Speaker 1: and we were on the second series. Radio play at
Speaker 1: that time in l A was more experimental. I can
Speaker 1: tell we're live on the air here at casey RM,
Speaker 1: Santa Monica. So we were played on case R job
Speaker 1: you kpf K Listens KPFK Listener sponsored Parcific, the radio
Speaker 1: for all of southern California, Angela. I mean we were
Speaker 1: part of a subculture. Yeah. Bred Woman marked the beginning
Speaker 1: of Anna's music career, which opened a whole new world
Speaker 1: for her creativity. In nine I went to Europe with
Speaker 1: David Moss and a project called Direct Sound, which was
Speaker 1: four or five vocalists and we just used our voices.
Speaker 1: And I'm always singing in bread language. I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't sing in English. As I toured Europe, I would
Speaker 1: meet people. When Germany there was one project called Sugar
Speaker 1: Connection with Frank Salty and Axel Auto. We would be
Speaker 1: installation all three tables in the center of the room,
Speaker 1: the three of us with electronics and toys, and we
Speaker 1: have a release on No Man's Land called Sugar Connection
Speaker 1: Plays Alien Cakes Good. Then I worked with Garrett Wegman,
Speaker 1: a Belgian violinist and producer. It was called Macaronic Signs
Speaker 1: and that guy, mutual friend was starting a label called Lowlands,
Speaker 1: which became this huge label in Antwerp, and we were
Speaker 1: one of his first releases, Undated Guy. And then we
Speaker 1: played at the Victi Festival and they released a CD
Speaker 1: of our lives performance called corn Devache Accords to the Cow.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and eleven, I worked with Sylvia Hallett
Speaker 1: in London and we did a project called Bread and
Speaker 1: Shed because I'm bread woman and Sylvia built a shed,
Speaker 1: so her partner called her shed Woman. Meanwhile, I've worked
Speaker 1: for many years with a kind of mad English producer
Speaker 1: called Pylon King, and our project is the Voices of Pawn.
Speaker 1: Every release is really different. There's some that are really
Speaker 1: high tag, there's some low tech. I mean, we recorded
Speaker 1: one in a trash dune in a forest. And in
Speaker 1: March is a release called Lose a sul Blue Light.
Speaker 1: This is shamanic and crazy. The liner notes say it's
Speaker 1: like a Gumby adventure in outer space. So since bread Woman,
Speaker 1: I've worked on a lot of different projects with great people,
Speaker 1: but none of the labels have the stature of revenge.
Speaker 1: Thirty years after the bread Woman cassette was released, Matt
Speaker 1: came across a copy at an art show my friend
Speaker 1: Justin Luke at his gallery called a B a Use,
Speaker 1: a full fledged recreation installation of Ken Montgomery's East Village
Speaker 1: record store Generation Records. The bread Woman tape was on
Speaker 1: the wall and I distinctly remember gravitating toward it because
Speaker 1: there is a picture of a woman with a loaf
Speaker 1: of bread on her head on the cover. Musically it
Speaker 1: reflected a lot of what I was digging into in
Speaker 1: terms of minimal synthesizer music, and then the vocals were
Speaker 1: just undeniable, such a huge force in those recordings. So
Speaker 1: I emailed Anna. He sent me an email, Oh, I
Speaker 1: really loved bread Woman, And then maybe two emails later
Speaker 1: he said, oh, I have a label, would you be
Speaker 1: interested in having bread Woman reached a new audience. It
Speaker 1: wasn't like she just walked away from music. She had
Speaker 1: another three decades of playing music between the bread Woman
Speaker 1: cassette and when the collection came out, But she had
Speaker 1: hung up the bread mask, so to speak, bread Woman.
Speaker 1: After she was the cassette, she went to sleep for
Speaker 1: thirty five years, and then Revenge woke her up. Matt
Speaker 1: and Company put together a collection of Anna's material that
Speaker 1: included the entire bread Woman tape and more. The title
Speaker 1: is bread Woman and Other Tales. It's a compilation of
Speaker 1: the work I did with Steve Mosher. The other Tales
Speaker 1: came from another project Steve and I did called a
Speaker 1: Liquium and See. It was an underwater sound poem about
Speaker 1: the disillusion of language and the stages of alchemy. Revenge
Speaker 1: released bread Woman and Other Tales three decades after the
Speaker 1: original cassette. It was super cool to see the music activated,
Speaker 1: of course, but then because there is a renewed interest
Speaker 1: in the character, we got to see bred Woman in
Speaker 1: the flesh, in the dough on stages. Touring with bred
Speaker 1: Woman has been a real learning experience these days, there's
Speaker 1: a dancer being bred Woman. I'm on stage, but I'm
Speaker 1: the soundtrack. Now I'm singing. I'm actually a very shy person,
Speaker 1: and to take the mask off and just being me,
Speaker 1: Anna Hommler singing. It was a huge deal for me
Speaker 1: across the board and a music is having a moment
Speaker 1: right now. I finally releasing my songs into the world,
Speaker 1: and that's so thrilling for me. I guess you would
Speaker 1: say my back catalog is finally seeing the light. Bread
Speaker 1: Woman was thirty five years later, right and los Azul
Speaker 1: was recorded in two thousand and eight. Last year, a
Speaker 1: Swiss label put out very ambient Things of Mine. Then
Speaker 1: Knock on Wood, the voices of Kuan will be releasing
Speaker 1: something which is called Who I Used to Be. All
Speaker 1: these things have taken years to come out. That seems
Speaker 1: to be my fate. A lot has come to me
Speaker 1: because of Bred Woman, and there's so much that could
Speaker 1: happen with her. I would love to do a children's story.
Speaker 1: I love to animate her. I'm so grateful to Matt
Speaker 1: and Revenge. I really am. It was disasise. It was
Speaker 1: it was. It was in the way Michelle and Anna's
Speaker 1: cannons were reactivated with archival releases. Revenge was to set
Speaker 1: their sights on an artist whose music, like the creator herself,
Speaker 1: seemed to exist outside of time. I'm Paulina and the
Speaker 1: Strong transplanea consort. I'm a reggae master feature, I do
Speaker 1: some spiritual counseling, and I'm a voracious reader. I listen
Speaker 1: auto that kind of thing because I'm totally blind. The
Speaker 1: other thing you need to know about Paula is that
Speaker 1: she cohabitates with two iguanas. Of course, I had my animals,
Speaker 1: which I'm sure you've heard of. Little Solstice is a
Speaker 1: saclora Newbilla Newbilla common name Cuban rock iguana. Then I
Speaker 1: have missed hus. She's an Australian blue tone. I carry
Speaker 1: her around like a baby so style, like, oh, this
Speaker 1: woman is carrying me around me. It's embarrassing. And I
Speaker 1: look at my animals as dinosaurs. I tell her the
Speaker 1: big dinosaurs were her ancestors. The species have just shrieked
Speaker 1: over time. They really love dinosaurs, baby dinosaurs. Paula grew
Speaker 1: up in Alabama and moved to California in the late sixties.
Speaker 1: She set than this apartment in the Tenderloin district that
Speaker 1: she lives into this very day. By the mid seventies,
Speaker 1: on terrestrial radio in San Francisco, there were some seminal
Speaker 1: radio shows like Hearts of Space music from the Hearts
Speaker 1: of Space, playing free form, largely instrumental music, will be
Speaker 1: hearing selections from some great albums from the early days
Speaker 1: of electronics space music. She really found this solace beamed
Speaker 1: to her from the radio airwaves. I always listened to
Speaker 1: a lot of classical music, and then I listened to
Speaker 1: a lot of Claus Schultz, Can Dream Dream and Angela Brian.
Speaker 1: You know, you could listen to all of those things
Speaker 1: and they could be present time or they could be
Speaker 1: five back. Of the music itself is timeless, Carl. Even
Speaker 1: his early work like Earl, was always timeless. Do you
Speaker 1: have classical training or some sort of formal musical training. No,
Speaker 1: all just by ear and by touch. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I just listened to a lot and I like pretty stuff, yes,
Speaker 1: but I'd like to range through experimental stuff a lot,
Speaker 1: even environmental landscapes through town. She became super obsessed with
Speaker 1: making her own version of that music, became a total gearhead,
Speaker 1: collecting wild synthesizers in her apartment and set up a
Speaker 1: pretty legitimate studio. I really fell in love with creativity
Speaker 1: when I was able to get to synthesize. I'm not
Speaker 1: an acoustive. I don't want to piano or harp, but
Speaker 1: give me the electronic machinery any day. When did you
Speaker 1: first come in contact with your first synthesizer? Oh god,
Speaker 1: um end of the seventies, early eighties, and it was
Speaker 1: just like love it, yes, yes, oh yes, the prophet Tien.
Speaker 1: It was my first love. All the programmability in it,
Speaker 1: it's not much compared to now, but then I thought
Speaker 1: it was incredible and then came to be at seven.
Speaker 1: It's that terriers. They took a program and create sounds
Speaker 1: from way forms. And I had an emulator, so you kids,
Speaker 1: sample was telling Jane sex and think he's five and
Speaker 1: a quarter disks, But it was just another component, you know,
Speaker 1: another way to do things. The perfect machine to me
Speaker 1: would be digital, but it would combine ree element in
Speaker 1: one box with a speech program that would tell me everything.
Speaker 1: A sharp attack, so things that were in the display,
Speaker 1: I could punch your button in and tell me what
Speaker 1: it said. And the slower decay. All of that would
Speaker 1: be the green machine, not like you would do on
Speaker 1: a computer with what do you guys use garage band?
Speaker 1: If I've heard of that. All kind of software like that,
Speaker 1: that's what seemed boring has held to me. I make
Speaker 1: sequencers and effects units and all that work for me
Speaker 1: and make them part of a composition, making it create
Speaker 1: inter rules, making its play creative parts. A marriage between
Speaker 1: the humans and the machinery. Because you give the machine light,
Speaker 1: the creativity to translate visual into audience, to evolve sounds
Speaker 1: that you never even heard it out before. The creative
Speaker 1: building blocks of these pieces seems simply to flow through Paul.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it starts with just a stamp, and sometimes it's
Speaker 1: just something I want to translate into sounds that in
Speaker 1: my head, A concept of thought, an image and idea.
Speaker 1: This in my head? Now, how did I get that? Intense?
Speaker 1: And I'll keep playing with things until I get it
Speaker 1: to come alive. Let's say something simple. I create the
Speaker 1: sound of water. There's a piece called rain on ancient Keys.
Speaker 1: I've created the drops of water on the the ex
Speaker 1: just by playing around with the waveforms and everything until
Speaker 1: I got exactly what I wanted. Of an engineer, I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna tell you I did this with this way
Speaker 1: form where this carrier or something like that that was
Speaker 1: DC access on mind with. I know what these things are.
Speaker 1: But when I start creating something. I don't know what
Speaker 1: they are. I just make it happen. You can sample,
Speaker 1: and sampling has its place, but the challenge and the
Speaker 1: creativity is to manipulate all of that and create something
Speaker 1: totally new or that you have in your head. Son,
Speaker 1: it be part of you. In the early eighties, Pulla
Speaker 1: began to commit her music to tape. Way back then.
Speaker 1: It was at Porter Studio Fortras and I hate tape, No,
Speaker 1: thank you. You'd have to overdub so much. You play
Speaker 1: it back and it wasn't quite what you wanted, and
Speaker 1: you gotta remember, I can't see all the meters. Uh.
Speaker 1: It was such a chore. That was the part I
Speaker 1: never liked, really, especially as I've evolved over the years.
Speaker 1: I don't like to record track by track. I hate that.
Speaker 1: I want to do it all at once, have all
Speaker 1: the sounds working together at the same time. I record
Speaker 1: as I'm working, and when I finally have tweaked everything
Speaker 1: to get the setup that I want, I don't know
Speaker 1: what my fingers are going to do, what they're going
Speaker 1: to play on the keyboard. I didn't do it. If
Speaker 1: it feels right, my dress record whatever comes out of
Speaker 1: me and the machine it just recorded in that moment
Speaker 1: in time. I don't remember what I play. I don't practice,
Speaker 1: I couldn't replay anything. I just sit and create. The
Speaker 1: truth of it is. I wonder how much of it
Speaker 1: is channeling. When you're in that creative space, time just
Speaker 1: sort of stands still. I don't get tired, and it's
Speaker 1: the morning before you know it. Like Michelle, like Anna,
Speaker 1: she also self manufactured her first albums and had a
Speaker 1: little help with distribution. I'm a creator, a composer. I'm
Speaker 1: not a business person. If somebody wasn't putting it out there,
Speaker 1: it probably would never get there. Paula's debut record came
Speaker 1: out in the first thing was the Transpora Consort album.
Speaker 1: It was vinyl. Years later, it would be that album
Speaker 1: cover that would catch Matt's attention. Her first album has
Speaker 1: this surrealistic kind of measure. It's eyeball floating in this
Speaker 1: cloud globe with this rainbow prism surrounding it. The back
Speaker 1: cover features an abstract picture of Paula looking or not
Speaker 1: looking wistfully into some sort of distance. That quality of
Speaker 1: timelessness that Paula admires is reflected in this title, trans
Speaker 1: Millennial Consort. It means companion to time, like a consort
Speaker 1: male or female. Trans millennia, meaning it's been all millennia.
Speaker 1: It's what I really am. I feel out of place
Speaker 1: in the modern world. I live more in the past
Speaker 1: than in the far future than an actual modern present time,
Speaker 1: even though I like my conveniences onthing held to mean
Speaker 1: the electricity and water. Okay, that's fine. She then manufactured
Speaker 1: a run of cassettes at the end of the eighties.
Speaker 1: There's a Japanese questions aquatic realms, a lot of pieces
Speaker 1: on their underwater pieces, some music, some strictly underwater duds,
Speaker 1: and every sound on their every one of them was
Speaker 1: done on the prophet. I don't know how I got
Speaker 1: them out there, but I love where they came out.
Speaker 1: And then there was a Moorish Project, which was a
Speaker 1: melding of Spanish and Arabian influence. And then there was
Speaker 1: Airport's Visions which was spacey kind of stuff m h.
Speaker 1: And there was Plot zero that was another vinyl that
Speaker 1: was a mine trip without chemicals and Spectrum Spectra was
Speaker 1: related to the Vampire Legends in kind of a dark sound.
Speaker 1: The four cassettes we just went to flea markets. Is
Speaker 1: that kind of thing and set up a table and
Speaker 1: a boom box and played my music and people bought
Speaker 1: it as long as it lasted for a lot of people,
Speaker 1: myself included the spirit and Paula's music speaks to something
Speaker 1: deep trans center. It's fludy how you can listen to
Speaker 1: a piece of music regardless of what project that was in,
Speaker 1: and the different interpretations that you can get over time.
Speaker 1: There is a piece called ice Chips, and it's like
Speaker 1: what I envisioned if you wouldn't be chipping away in
Speaker 1: a block of ice with an apt the chips falling
Speaker 1: and that kind of thing. The friend told me when
Speaker 1: he listened to that he could feel it in his chest.
Speaker 1: The frequencies, the sounds and the mood and everything that
Speaker 1: you create. It's a language, like the God are the
Speaker 1: all all these frequencies are in language. You can feel
Speaker 1: them and your body and they affect heally and it
Speaker 1: affects the emotion. This is just me positing something here,
Speaker 1: but maybe that's sort of why you know it when
Speaker 1: you hear it. Yes, that's a perfect statement. Yes you
Speaker 1: got it. Yes, Yes, what were you up to between
Speaker 1: a lot of drama? I have read that you know
Speaker 1: like you sold your synthesizers. I think, right, yeah, I
Speaker 1: have to imagine that that. I mean, that was unfortunate
Speaker 1: for you, certainly unfortunate for your audience as well. It
Speaker 1: comes down to survival. In those intervening years, Paula's music
Speaker 1: maintained a following, even as physical copies of her work
Speaker 1: became incredibly rare. There was a fan base out there,
Speaker 1: kind of like a cult of Paula, even though those
Speaker 1: albums are completely impossible to find. Paula also didn't save
Speaker 1: any masters. All of them were gone. I mean, we
Speaker 1: told them all. Matt took it upon himself to get
Speaker 1: this music back into the light. I first reached out
Speaker 1: to Paula years and years ago. She does not use computers.
Speaker 1: I'm not a computer person at all. No social media
Speaker 1: this w I can't even remember who gave me her number,
Speaker 1: but that's how I had to find her. I started calling,
Speaker 1: sometimes getting her automated voicemail. This is Reverend Paula energy
Speaker 1: healing spiritual counselor and Ricky Master Chick, which also doubled
Speaker 1: as her raiky practice outgoing message. I specialize in distance
Speaker 1: healing spiritual counseling with the spice of coming sin, and
Speaker 1: I strive to teach people to be their own highest authority.
Speaker 1: She invites you to her world of healing, which was
Speaker 1: already a beagon for me to go further. You earn
Speaker 1: charge of your freedom and your life, and you are
Speaker 1: connected to the God of your heart. Thank you, answered
Speaker 1: the phone, Paula. Yes, well, this is not not who.
Speaker 1: We started talking from that on and he wanted to
Speaker 1: do as a compilation. That's how we connected. She was
Speaker 1: reluctant about revisiting that music, but the roll of getting
Speaker 1: to speak with her was good enough for me at
Speaker 1: the time. We just became phone friends. That's decent, that's good.
Speaker 1: He's honest. There was kind of a dip in communication
Speaker 1: for a good two years. I just remember walking home
Speaker 1: one day and her music coming back to me in
Speaker 1: this great wave, calling her and just being like, Paula,
Speaker 1: it's Matt. We haven't talked for a while, but we
Speaker 1: really really should revisit that music. She was like, let's
Speaker 1: do this. I'm so ready right now. Timing was right,
Speaker 1: she was in the same headplace. Thus began that process
Speaker 1: of going through her archives. How did you feel about
Speaker 1: putting this music back out I'm feel good about it.
Speaker 1: I really did. Transmillennium music, a compilation of Paula's full
Speaker 1: discography was released by Rift Again. We wanted to re
Speaker 1: contextualize her entire story by spanning all of her music
Speaker 1: and by creating the narrative in the liner notes and
Speaker 1: the photos and the artwork. So that was a collection
Speaker 1: of her three albums that she commercially released that actually
Speaker 1: ended up on vinyl, and then the four cassettes. Even
Speaker 1: though there are a lot of Paula purists out there,
Speaker 1: we just felt that there was a need for kind
Speaker 1: of like a primer of Paula's music. Like Michelle and
Speaker 1: Anna Revengers involvement shifted Paula's path as an artist. She
Speaker 1: started to recognize more and more that there was an
Speaker 1: audience for her music, and she does not want that
Speaker 1: to be the only body of music representing her creativity.
Speaker 1: She really wants to focus on making new music, not
Speaker 1: dwell on the past. The Revenge released coincided with an
Speaker 1: important development. For the first time in the New Millennium,
Speaker 1: Pauline Anna Strong had synthesizers again had recently got the
Speaker 1: core of Cross and the Novations. It's the beginning of
Speaker 1: him redoing the compilation. Then it got me in the mood,
Speaker 1: and because we got these pieces of equipment for me,
Speaker 1: I wanted to do music again. The new album will
Speaker 1: be out, I think in February, Angel Tears in Sunlight.
Speaker 1: I didn't come up with the title until it was
Speaker 1: all done, until I listened to all my pieces together.
Speaker 1: There's a piece on the new album tropical Rainforest, but's
Speaker 1: go like wind, it's got like some water, it's got
Speaker 1: birds at just twisted sounds. Until I got exactly this
Speaker 1: whole montage of what the rainforest should be in my interpretation.
Speaker 1: H m hm. With this totally new album, this is
Speaker 1: a new need. I haven't dramatically changed, but it's become
Speaker 1: more sophisticated Noway, it's like I'm in another phase of life.
Speaker 1: Was there maybe also a way that it felt like
Speaker 1: like coming home, reconnecting with with this medium that you
Speaker 1: lost or hadn't hadn't been with in a long time. Yes, Yes,
Speaker 1: And I know I've got a lot more to do.
Speaker 1: My life is my music, and it's a brand new life.
Speaker 1: That's why I've got to live to be well over
Speaker 1: a hundred. I've got so much more to do. I
Speaker 1: don't know what the next music project will be, but
Speaker 1: I'm going to be working on it. I don't know
Speaker 1: why I say this, but I think in a way,
Speaker 1: there's going to come a time when Little Solstice will
Speaker 1: influence a lot of it. At least one project. Imagination
Speaker 1: is the key to all this kind of stuff, and
Speaker 1: one saying seeds on another and another and another. I
Speaker 1: just want my mind, my soul to take me into
Speaker 1: what I need to get those things into reality. That's
Speaker 1: why I say this is an endless project. Angel Tears
Speaker 1: in Sunlight debuted on the Revenge label in February. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: her first work in thirty years was released posthumously. Paula
Speaker 1: passed away last fall, about a month after we talked
Speaker 1: for Matt her ever growing network of fans and countless
Speaker 1: souls that her light touched. It has been a devastating blow.
Speaker 1: The Iguanas Little Solstice and ms Huff are safe in
Speaker 1: being cared for. Through her music, Paula's spirit lives on
Speaker 1: a companion across time and space. Ephemeral is written and
Speaker 1: assembled by Alexander Williams and produced by Any Reese, Matt Frederick,
Speaker 1: and Tristi McNeil. With additional mixing from Josh Thing and
Speaker 1: special thanks this episode to Matthew Michaels, Alexis Birth Alone,
Speaker 1: Daniel Goodman, Sama, Joe Concilia and met Worth. Find all
Speaker 1: this magnificent music from Michelle Mercure, AA Hammler, Pauline Anastrong
Speaker 1: and the rest of the Revenge catalog online that I
Speaker 1: get r v G dot com and hear more from
Speaker 1: us over at ephemeral dot Show. Next time on it
Speaker 1: was just in a plane sleeve, inside a plane cardboard sleeve.
Speaker 1: It looked like something that was home produced. Well, it
Speaker 1: says on it is musical memories of Camper and Avin.
Speaker 1: Part one is on the front side and part two
Speaker 1: is listening on the back. And then it's a simple
Speaker 1: recording service. Why Amanda, Wisconsin. If I saw a record
Speaker 1: like that anywhere, I would snatch it immediately, like, well,
Speaker 1: what is this? Support Ephemeral by recommending an episode, leaving
Speaker 1: a review, or dropping us a line at Ephemeral Show.
Speaker 1: The more podcast from my Heart Radio, visit the I
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