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Freedom To Spend

MERCURE, MICHELE - Eye Chant

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, Micheles 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 machines 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.



The natural and the mechanical elements of Eye Chant commingle with the ease of a musician well-versed in the social-material entanglements of life. Like the lacework referenced in one track, Mercures record alludes to interconnections and their unraveling. Her married name formerly attached to Eye Chant has been shed for this iteration. As her electronic kin, Eliane Rodigue and Suzanne Ciani would attest, its all raw material for the musician to give form. Donna Haraway and Lucy Suchman may have been listening.



Michele offers a tender mechanics to attune to. Atmospheres expand and contract within a song, sometimes reappearing in the album - the economy of means appreciated from another vantage. Loops and undulating rhythms build up a particular kind of surface, one that places the listener in the present moment, to notice and extend that time of being here.



To get a sense of the space Mercures work occupies: compositions on this album were part of a PBS special and a performance artists production. The most narrative moments of Eye Chant, these commissioned pieces, “Proteus and the Marlin” and “100% Bridal Illusion,” are hyper feminine tracks made up of choirs of birds, breath, baby cries, waves, and poetry read just above a whisper.



The title track, “Eye Chant,” is a single vocal sample thats sequenced and melodically layered upon itself. A perfect minimal composition, where theres no excess blurring how it was made and its final crystalline form. “Too Much” closes the album with some danceability. We have traveled far from the start — “Tour de France,” where the synthesizer resembles a faucet drip and we reset — to the pace of our heart and breath.



When focused on the moment the mind wanders as it likes. It feels as though theres a collective and urgent need to decelerate. Rather than chasing the new sound or accelerating discovery, deceleration allows us to pay heed to whats less heard. Finding our time in continuum with others might be one of many impulses for reissues.



One way to interpret the name, Freedom to Spend, is an abundance of freedom that needs to be shared. In that spirit, the free thinking / art of Michele Mercure is recirculated. - Freedom To Spend.
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After nearly a decade of false starts, multiple game plans veering off the rails, and a handful of shattered hopes and/or dreams, the odyssey is finally complete—the new Fusetron site is here.

This is the first phase of a multipart rollout that will span the next few months: the currently browsable stock includes miscellaneous new releases from the past 8+ months (we have a lot of catching up to do), plus approximately a third of our backstock. Note that we’ve reduced/slashed prices on many titles and will continue to do so in order to make room for new stock. We’ll also be expanding / tweaking / improving / debugging the site itself (for example, we still have work to do on the automated international postage system, not to mention the inevitable inventory discrepancies that come with transferring an ancient and massive database to a new system).

Over the next few months, as we take inventory, clean house, and delve into our storage, we will be uploading thousands of additional items, gradually, on a near-daily basis. This will include the majority of the LPs, as well as many titles, in all formats, once thought long-gone. Many currently “sold out” items are likely to resurface.

Finally, once our general backstock is up (probably in the next two or three months) we’ll begin making our extensive stockpile of rarities available online for the first time: tons of random out-of-print titles, "deadstock," warehouse finds, secondhand collectibles, etc., accumulated over the past few decades.

Frequent/returning customers will be getting early access to these items. Details to follow on how this will work (a priority mailing list? a 'frequent flyer'-like program?), but it will not be based on dollars spent. We want to reward those who consistently support us, especially in the discogs marketplace era (to those who show up trying to poach five copies of a one-off rarity, and nothing else, ever… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).

So—we suggest you take some time to dig through the site—even we’ve been surprised by what’s been turning up, and there’s much more to come.
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