Michelle Mercure

Michelle Mercure was an electronic music composer and musician. Michelle worked across various genres, but can be characterised by her commitment to electronic synthesis. Her first break came when she composed the soundtrack for a staging of Samuel Beckett play “Waiting For Godot” in her old hometown Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1982. Theatre scores were an important element of her musical trajectory and were representative of her interest in combining the aural and the visual. Collaborating with performance artists suited her artistic vision.

Michelle’s approach was very lo-fi to begin with and she was originally concerned with creating what she called  ‘sound environments’ and ‘tone poems’, combining guitar loops, vocals and atmospheric electronics.

The music scene in Harrisburg in the 80s where she was living was lacking the breadth and depth of bigger cities, so Mercure began exchanging bedroom tapes with other musicians she discovered in a magazine called OP.

The Minute ‘Dreamplay 2’ is indicative of her interest in dreams and dream sequences. Mercure says that ideas for music often came to her while she was sleeping – ‘I was dreaming a lot of music’. This is reflected in her approach to music and art.