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

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