Michele Mercure Beside Herself

Michele Mercure is an American recording artist, soundtrack, and score composer
residing in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Mercure was part of a group of American
musicians in the 80s dabbling with new and cutting edge instrument technologies and
self-distribution including Pauline Anna Strom, Lauri Paisley, and K. Leimer. "Beside
Herself" is the next edition of RVNG Intl.'s ReRVNG archival series, presented in
collaboration with Freedom To Spend, following the latter label's 2017 reissue of
Mercure's 1986 album Eye Chant. The music collected on "Beside Herself" includes
works from Mercure's releases "Rogue and Mint" (1983), "A Cast of Shadows"
(1984), "Dreams Without Dreamers" (1985), and "Dreamplay" (1990), circulated
through tape-trading networks assisted largely by insightful editorial in Eurock, a
seminal music magazine covering progressive rock and electronic music scenes.
Michele Mercure often dreams of music, and in her waking life, reclaims fragments of
these fleeting, floating melodies in her compositions and sound art. Beside Herself,
an anthology of Mercure's self-produced and distributed cassettes released between
1983 and 1990, collects these dreamlike passages and lo-fi nocturnes, preserving the
qualities of discovery and intimacy surrounding their genesis. Mercure's sound is a
porous electronic art that overlaps ambient, abstract, and industrial sensibilities - its
spaciousness reveals an artist attuned cinematically rather than for radio play or
public performance. She approached the latter theatrically, and rarely, disdaining
most live shows as too serious, and bringing her music to bare on her audiences in
playful, immersive contexts. On recordings, Mercure's night lit synth music evokes
non-confined environments, at once expressionistic and minimal and always aware of
its surroundings. · RIYL: Conrad Schnitzler, Pauline Anna Strom, Muslimgauze, Art of
Noise, Lena Platanos.