Europe booking : Marie / Julie Tippex marie@julietippex.com
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I edited my profile with Thomas Myspace Editor V4.4 (www.strikefile.com/myspace)
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"Wild sounds, great chops."
-- Tony Conrad
Selected Press:
Pittsburgh City Paper
1.15.09
"With 88 hammers and sharp attack, it's no great stretch to think of the piano as a percussion instrument - an idea John Cale has been going on about for sometime now. Pittsburgher Melissa St. Pierre gives a nod toward another JC - John Cage - with her treated piano, which she transforms into a full, sonorous percussion ensemble capable of unearthly tones and hypnotic rhythmic motifs. It's landed her on the Table of the Elements/Radium label, and she's touring Europe this summer..."
--Aaron Jentzen
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"Melissa St Pierre est à la ville, une jeune New Yorkaise touche à tout fortement impliquée dans les Arts Contemporains: au Salem Art Works de New York comme directrice associée, participant de-ci delà au Flickr Film Festival ou au Lichtenstein Center, occasionnellement bookeuse et organisatrice de concert, de performances…
Melissa fait campagne artistique derrière un piano qu'elle prépare avec la précision du maître John Cage, usant de nombreux objets intercalés entre les cordes et les marteaux croisés avec des sonorités électroniques… Ses compositions aux timbres extatiques, se rapprochant de l'effet hypnotique du gamelan balinais et empruntent autant à la tradition de la musique classique que de l'approche contemporaine répétitive ou au Rock dans son immédiateté. On pense à son amie harpiste Zeena Parkins, mais aussi en vrac aux sessions ethnomusicologiques de Can, au collections de percussions d'Harry Partch, à certaines explorations de This Heat…
Récemment signé sur l'exigeant label de Tony Conrad Table of the Elements, Melissa St Pierre a partagé la récente tournée de Collection of Colonies Of Bees et la scène de Neptune par exemple.
Une sonorité particulière du festival et une première date unique en France!"
http://mixbbmix.googlepages.com/melissastpierre
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"A friend of harp-destroyer and fellow Table of the Elements lady Zeena Parkins, Melissa St. Pierre takes a similar pleasure in eliciting sounds from her instrument that one never really associates with it. The instrument in question here is the piano and St. Pierre has clearly prepared it with all manner of oddities resulting in the sort of avant clatter you might more readily associated with experimental music of the early 20th century. Her sound is one of an intergalactic gamelan orchestra by way of Stomp! and little can distract from the clatter and clang of her rhythms and timbre. It's arresting stuff from beginning to end and what the record loses in length (it clocks in at a paltry sixteen minutes) it makes up for in sheer balls. The press release compares St. Pierre's sound to that of Voodoo drums, and who am I to disagree? Mystical stuff for sure, and while not for everyone the more adventurous among you will no doubt get a kick out of 'Specimens'. Very good indeed."
http://www.boomkat.com/item.cfm?id=109624
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"june 2008 release ; a suite of rhythm-heavy prepared piano pieces from composer melissa st. pierre ...
calls to mind the more bar-room piano trappings of "church of anthrax" & the solo piano bits of aphex twin's "drukqs" only with a bit more filigree ... nice, short pieces don't overstay their welcome ..."
http://www.mimaroglumusicsales.com/artists/melissa+st.+pierre.html
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5.30.2008
Summertime Piano Mutilation
"I don't know what it's like where you are, Dear Reader, but in Budapest spring is here and there are flowers all over the place. Summer is right around the corner, which for this writer means drinking lotsa beer outside with friends, having loud conversations, eating cherry soup, dancing to records in various poorly lit rooms with creaky disco balls, checking out all kinds of live music, and generally having just about the best time I'm gonna have all year.
It also means that we here at The Little Black Egg pick a feelgood jam of the summer. Last summer, our feelgood fun jam was "Vomiting Mirrors" by Clockcleaner. Usually the feelgood hit is a new release, but not always—in 2006, the feelgood hit of the summer was "So Inernational" by B-Legit (feat. Too $hort), which actually came out in 2002. But this year, we return to the present day with Melissa St. Pierre's "fig. VIII," off of her Specimens EP released on Table of the Elements.
I didn't grow up listening to jazz , so every time I listen to improv or experimental or "new" music a certain amount of effort is required for me to wrap my head around the sounds I'm hearing. Not that I'm complaining—I'm willing to put in the work. In my experience, active listening is usually rewarded.
But sometimes, intensely active listening can make me feel like I've been on a really long sea voyage on the Sloop John B, and I just wanna go home: for me, "going home" means sitting around listening to Alice Cooper. I'm sure I can't be the only person who feels this way—hungry for new sounds, but secretly craving tunes that make you want to get down. Getting both can be a rare thing indeed, but when you do . . . oh, when you do.
Enter Specimens.
The album has eight songs and clocks in at just over fifteen minutes. But really, it could run like one long song in eight parts. The main instrument is a prepared piano, which proves to pretty rad both on paper and in practice.
As many of you probably know, the prepared piano was invented by John Cage, and is basically a piano with stuff stuck between the strings so that the piano makes a whole bunch of different noises. I don't really know much about John Cage, but I do know that John Cale prepared his piano by sticking paperclips in its strings to get the crazy-ass sound you hear on "All Tomorrow's Parties" offa The Velvet Underground and Nico.
The sound of the prepared piano on Specimens veers between atmospheric noise piano and sounds that are more percussive—whole hosts of weird piano tones that sound like bells or steel drums or just odd, ringing, resonant things. Who knows what strange fate befell this piano, but it makes sounds that you're not going to hear anywhere else.
I don't know who else plays on this record, but it sounds like someone is triggering samples on a laptop, and there's someone playing drums. That might not sound like it would be accessible but it is. Strange territory is explored, and the music goes in a lot of different directions without being alienating or difficult. In fact, it's downright catchy—sort of a Zeena Parkins vibe by way of Konono No. 1.
Sixteen minutes, eight songs, one slab of music. And I don't know for sure, but this might be the first instance of a prepared piano record that you can dance to. (In fact, you should dance to it.) Don't hold back. Go have a good time—it's the summer, for chrissakes.
It seems there's a video for fig. VIII.
Finally, might I add—that Table of the Elements label? They're a class act. They consistently release top shelf product. Here's to hoping that this album sees a vinyl release." --Rick Stinson
http://thelittleblackegg.blogspot.com/2008/05/summertime-piano-mutilation.html
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"The rounded, flowing, and permeable character of Specimens' cover organisms are in direct contrast to the EPs' eight miniatures which are dominated by the jagged and hard-edged clatter of prepared piano and percussion (the piano's strings, hammers, and dampers are all peppered with objects during the EP). In this debut collection, Melissa St. Pierre's electronically-enhanced music invites the label "musique mécanique," so suggestive is it of a mechanical orchestra with all its pistons firing. The opening "figure" sounds as if objects are being hurled against the piano strings in an attempt to derail the instrument's ponderous melody while the second anchors clockwork ostinato patterns with a deathly drum pound. The third is rambunctiously funky in a scrap-heap sort of way, while the frenzied fourth threatens to teeter completely out of control. Listeners obsessed with categorizing will have a tough time with Specimens; being so genre-defying, St. Pierre's seventeen-minute set comes close to carving out its own unique niche. Had Dadaists and Futurists assembled in a Paris apartment one evening in the 1920s and augmented the host's altered piano with junkyard noise-makers, the sonic results might have sounded very much like Specimens."
June 2008
http://www.textura.org/reviews/stpierre.htm
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http://alloveralbany.com/archive/2008/04/01/melissa-st-pierre
"We stumbled across this North Adams musician a few weeks ago and her music is kind of awesome. It's funky and mechanical in a way that reminds us of a hive of robotic bees."
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http://mog.com/jenny/blog_post/150095
"Jon Mueller also plays drums for Melissa St. Pierre, this time, stripped back to just a tom on the floor, an unmoored snare drum and a cymbal. St. Pierre plays an altered piano. It looks like a baby grand, and also like an electric keyboard and makes a variety of not-very piano like sounds, some of them like xylophone or marimba, others stringier and more like a harpsichord. Jim Schoenecker sits in on electronics, and I believe that most of the traditional piano notes come from his laptop. In fact, it's the interplay between sampled, looped sounds and live, improvised ones that makes this set so interesting, the skitter of percussion, the plinking tones of St. Pierre's instrument dancing over a surface of tightly controlled loops, a sort of geometrical kaleidoscope of shifting sounds."
Melissa St. Pierre "Fig. VIII"
From the CD Specimens, TOE-CD-814
Release date: June 17, 2008
MELISSA ST. PIERRE tosses classicism and post-classicism overboard,
utilizing the prepared piano -- John Cage's notorious instrument of
choice -- and electronic enhancement to sail resolutely in the
direction of rock & roll. Peppering the strings, hammers, and dampers
of the piano with a variety of objects, she transforms the
instrument's typical timbre: sparkling gamelans chatter; harrowing
voodoo drums call out in the night. SPECIMENS, St Pierre's debut,
features production and performances by COLLECTIONS OF COLONIES OF BEES; together they rival famed electric harpist Zeena Parkins as
conservatory arsonists with a decidedly Hendrixian flair.
1) Audiomachie (6:21) 2) Une ombre vacille en serpentin virevoltant (6:58) 3) Bruissement de griserie (9:55) 4) Propensity to go forward (7:36) 5) Drawing of a Back with a Mouth (4:24) 6) Second Life (3:50)
(39:12)
- The project was about trying to explore different poetry styles, always with different instrumentations and musical structures because I don't want to repeat a single one
Most of you will just want to listen to the music made available. Well, here it is with great streaming (right after MA VIE est ICI which is a reminder of my previous album conclusion) http://www.freakywaves.com
MATTIN (internationally-touring conceptual sound artist/guitar+electronics improvisor/author from Basque Country; currently in residency at New York City's Whitney Museum of Art; has collaborated with artists including: Eddie Prevost, Dion Workman, Oren Ambarchi, Dean Roberts, Bruce Russell, Campbell Kneale, Tony Conrad, Taku Sugimoto, Matthew Bower and Junko.)
plus sets by local heavyweights:
MICHAEL JOHNSEN (solo electronics)
MELISSA ST. PIERRE (solo prepared keyboard and electronics)
TUSK LORD (solo electronics)
doors open at 7pm
concert at 8pm (ending at approx. 11pm)
$7 suggested donation (for the musicians)
all-ages
this event will serve as the closing reception of "SWORN IN: a group art exhibition curated by Lauri Mancuso" which features the work of Darien D'Alfonso, Edgar Um Bucholtz, Sarah Smith, Spoon Popkin, Benjamin Gersch, Jennifer Lee, John Riegert, Suzann Miriello, David Miriello and Chris Ivey.
FUTURE TENANT 819 Penn Avenue (in downtown Pittsburgh) Pittsburgh, PA 15222 phone 412.325. 7037
