Michele Mercure originally issued Eye Chant in 1986 under her then married name Michele Musser. The privately pressed album has become a sought after document of time. Mercure was part of a group of American musicians in the 1980s dabbling with new and cutting edge instrument technologies including Laurie Paisley, Don Slepian, and The Nightcrawlers. The first edition of 500 copies housed in letterpressed, sustainable jackets designed by Will Work For Good, with liner notes by Jed Bindeman, a founding member of Freedom To Spend. You can see the sounds her voice makes. The literal depiction of this, a photograph of Michele Mercure with an eyeball in her mouth, is removed in the updated album art. The original graphic elements are left to suspend, speak, and sing across time. In the absence of the decade-specific portraits, the redesigned edition is dislocated from a particular or linear history. Our initial point of encounter is artifactual; a trace in place of a scar. Accordingly, Michele's true image and body is sound. Eye Chant, as a whole, offers meditations of sound as material. Her instruments are voice and synthesizer, the former following the machine's lead and language of patterns. Machine sounds become abstract words. The human voice is pulled apart, dislodged from context; a tactile, textured quality appears to reconfigure the body and machine presently or permanently.
