as featured on:

Radio Eclectus #15: Haas, Sorey, Crispell, Crumb (Oct. 24, 2019)

We hear Tyshawn Sorey as composer and Marilyn Crispell as bandleader before the two join together on drums and piano for their new epic album: The Adornment of Time. In between, we take our first look at the remarkable Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas, and celebrate the 90th birthday of George Crumb by seeing how his style evolved from Berio then continued in a straight line through his latest completed work: a 40-minute take on Pictures at an Exhibition performed by Margaret Leng Tan. Electronic music by Seattle’s St Celfer rounds out the playlist. Radical new music with cherishing commentary by Mike Schell.

Also featured: TAK ensemble, Harvey Sorgen, Joe Fonda, Christine Schadeberg, Musicians’ Accord, Speculum Musicae, Martin Lorenz, Collegium Novum Zürich, Enno Poppe. Photo credits: St Celfer by Marcus Leoni, Haas by Mollena Williams-Haas via Facebook, Crispell by Bobby Glazer, Tan by Michael Dames, Crumb by Becky Starobin/Bridge Records via Facebook, Sorey by Steven Pisano.

Bandcamp

Suite #2: Impromptu

as featured on: 

Radio Eclectus #29: Radical new music (Jan. 30, 2020)

Radical new music from around the world. Improv from Chi & NYC, dark ambient from Zürich, fixed media from Seattle, postminimalist from Texas, Asian-American chamber music, Michael Gordon’s cello fuzz (via Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood), Hans Abrahamsen’s piano concerto, & astringent discourses from Europe, Uruguay & the US. Plus celebrate the 60th BD of George Benjamin, the 75th of Noah Creshevsky, and the 80th of video pioneer (& violinist) Steina Vasulka.

Photos: St Celfer by Marcus Leoni, Michael Gordon by Peter Serling, Dave Phillips by Mei Zhiyong, Jennifer Jolley by Elizabeth Glenn, Ben LaMar Gay by Oliver Abels, Chen Yi by Kuandi Photos, Noah Creshevsky via the artist, Naked City (Horvitz, Zorn, Baron, Frisell, Frith) via Wikipedia, Osvaldo Colluccino via the artist, Chinary Ung via UCSD, Tyshawn Sorey by Steven Pisano, Steina Vasulka via the artist. Also featured: Jennifer Curtis, S. Eric Scribner, James Ilgenfritz, Coriún Aharonián, Roberto Fabbriciani, Alexandre Tharaud.

Suite #2: Divertimento

as featured on:

Wednesday 5 - 7pm (EDT) | On WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio
Ridgewood Radio with David Weinstein: Playlist from December 7, 2022: Energy Bars
Rejuvenating concoctions from Sarah Pagé, Peter Evans, St Celfer, Ches Smith, Komodo Kolektif, and more...

Stereo mix of an experiment presenting 16 tracks on 16 speakers pointed in different directions. The artist lives between São Paulo and Seattle.

Suite #5: Finale

as featured on:

Wednesday 5 - 7pm (EDT) | On WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio
Ridgewood Radio with David Weinstein: Playlist from August 2, 2023: Dark Matter
Tracks playing in the multiverse, from Vasco Trilla & Ra Kalam Bob Moses,
Jeremiah Cymerman & Charlie Looker, Felicia Sjögren,
Bass Bridge Quartet, St. Celfer, and more...

Stereo mix from a Suite experimenting with 16 tracks on 16 speakers pointed in different directions. St Celfer is of Korean and American origin and floats between São Paulo, NYC, Seattle, DC, and the Bay Area.  

Suite #1: Fantasia

as featured on both:

Tuesday 9pm - Midnight (EDT) | On WFMU | 91.1, 90.1, 91.9 FM
Freaking Out with Kendraplex: Playlist from January 20, 2025
Extra dimensions are old hat. Now each vibe is a Pokémon, wwyd? Agitation classics, spiritual chaos, noise genre, drone excerpts, tone worship, safe & sane record warping. Music! Every media format! Incoming and outgoing phone calls! Voicemail, audio attachments, reading your horoscopes thru a tasteful amount of delay. For the people.

Flotation Device 2021-08-01 - New creative music

Great music from multiple continents: composed, improvised and fixed media—for Western and non-Western, and even medieval, instruments. We start out with new albums from Evan Parker and the transcultural septet Karkhana. We also sample a newly-rediscovered Cecil Taylor big band gig from 1990, relating it to the new Francisco Mela/Matthew Shipp/William Parker trio album. Syrphe's Cedrik Fermont & Seattle’s St Celfer offer avant-electronica, while Stefano Gervasoni & Nina C. Young send prerecorded memories through special loudspeakers mounted to a piano soundboard and a snare drum head. The Albuquerque-based duo Endlings joins with Marshall Trammell for a strange blend of rock, free improv & loop music, while Sharon Bezaly & the Royal Scottish play Ye, Ilya Gringolts plays Holliger, and Catalina Vicens plays Boondiskulchok on a portative organ. Creative & improvised music from the Northwest and around the world with host Michael Schell.

as featured on:

Flotation Device 2022-06-26 - no place to go but Flotation Device

For years, Rzewski fans have awaited a modern recording of his key transitional work No Place to Go but Around. We’ve finally got it, thanks to Lisa Moore, and you can hear the whole thing on this podcast. We also crack open the latest Unexplained Sounds collection of avant-electronica, as well as the final box set from Wadada Leo Smith’s 80th birthday spurt featuring duets with four different drummers (it’s Andrew Cyrille’s turn this week). We look back on a Mauricio Kagel oddity for its 50th anniversary, comparing it with the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s contemporaneous experiments and with a new recording featuring some of our favorite Chinese free improvisors. We check out Gordon Grdina's Nomad Trio, assess The Four Seasons Recomposed recomposed, and renew our acquaintance with Tom Johnson’s minimalist string quartets and St Celfer’s strident electronics.

Creative and improvised music from the Northwest and around the world with host Michael Schell. 

Lives

Ping Me Bjork

Wave Track #7 comes to us from St Celfer, a Korean-American sound artist and musician who splits his time between Sao Paulo and Seattle. His track, Fifty One, wastes no time announcing itself, beginning with a sequence of machine-like, harsh sounds that rise in volume before slowly giving way to a melancholic rhythm, interspersed with soft tones that combine to create a nostalgic, almost cinematic quality. In just under three minutes, St Celfer manages to elicit a strong yearning for elsewhere, a sensibility that encapsulates–and communicates with–the other works presented in Infrasonica’s Wave #7. We hope you enjoy listening. INFRASONICA.ORG

Fifty One

"I am interested in completely free patterns that when mixed unexpectedly change keys or tempo. I create an urgency to find one piece that holds the chaos together.

There are midi converters, which only understand chromatic input. There is a theremin component, which can be tuned to doric for some added drama. Meanwhile CD turntables are scratched manually and wired into the same midi note converters. Cramming input devices together makes more output unpredictability, with overloaded notes dropped. I never quite know what is happening through the complex configuration.

For me music has to move you and not fall back into the background. So, the tracks are not quantized, to keep the listener alert by hearing small rubs, imperfections, and, in turn, this forces me to learn how to make a song from core elements. I'm a fan of folk music and want to make a kind of electronic folk using my untrained background to an advantage."

*excerpted and edited for length from the conversation with Tom Moody (www.tommoody.us/archives/2020/12/04/on-breaking-the-square-a-conversation-between-john-parker-and-tom-moody/) 

Always live and improvised: Step.4D™ by St Celfer™.

The 60's were a good era for 'psychedelic' music - at least, this is what's said. Allow me some visual clanging and flip that 6 to a 9 and talk about the Seattle 90's, also effluent in the 'psychedelic':

"I’ve been listening to old Nirvana bootlegs. I can say my music is influenced by the smashing of instruments at the end of their gigs. Each one is a unique orchestration but within a structure until it exhausts itself. It’s not random or just noise. There is a timing and build of tension. It is even more dramatic to only hear it rather than to watch it.

Kurt Cobain used to make music by surfing the radio and piecing it together with no editing, like early musique concrete collages. He had an old cassette recorder where you have to push the record and play buttons together and then push pause. You can hear the clicks, the getting up to speed..."*

...the tape warbles, and the shitilly timed stops.

*excerpted from the conversation with Tom Moody (www.tommoody.us/archives/2020/12/04/on-breaking-the-square-a-conversation-between-john-parker-and-tom-moody/)

Always live and improvised: Step.4D™ by St Celfer™. 

...I’m making music in real time (as opposed to tracking and then arranging) by using an instrument, homemade, or more accurately, “gambiarra,” in Brasilian Portuguese, to be played and heard live. I want to transition from an in-studio process to a live and improvised situation. I will be performing or, in other words, responding, in the moment to the actions I am making, rather than looking backwards and taking the best from pre-recorded material and re-composing it. In the 2004 interview I aspired to make new sounds or music, etc. Now I would substitute “explore” for “make.” Trying for “the new” is understood but “how” is more important.

The instrument’s creation is, itself, an exploration. I can never quite wrap my head around it. I am enjoying being lost. I travel step by step, try a decision, usually walk back, then forward again, on each sound generating component. My energies have gone into the creation of the interface between man and machine. It's a monster getting larger by eating itself.

For instance, there are midi converters, which only understand perfectly tuned chromatic input. There is a theremin component, which can be tuned to doric instead of chromatic scale for some added drama. Meanwhile two CD turntables that I scratch are manually wired into the same midi note converters. Cramming two input devices together makes more output unpredictability, with overloaded notes dropped.

The "gambiarra," now called Step.4D™, has reached a stage of completion where Parker could begin performing on it. Recordings (and some additional explanation) can be found on his website. He has been too prolific for me to keep up with all the recorded performances but I made some notes on a single piece, "STC.lives.solo12.2.9.21" [Soundcloud link] to try to convey the flavor:

A lazy description might be dark ambient or punk ambient but I think of ambient as minimal work ("a tint" to use Eno's phrase) and St Celfer's is more substantial.
"STC.lives.solo12.2.9.21" is atmospheric but has structure. There are two distinct movements. The first half could be a loose jazz ensemble (Parker's work has been compared to Bitches Brew-era Miles) riffing on simple notes with digital, time-stretching fillips and enhancements; the second half is more drone-y and builds to a dense, chord-like timbre.
It must be emphasized that this isn't a band and there is no post-production reassembly: it's one person playing a multi-faceted, self-feedbacking instrument, and it's all done with a single pass. Yet it sounds like group activity.

If I had to venture an electronic music precedent I might say Tod Dockstader. The official Kenneth Goldsmith/Ubuweb narrative about Dockstader is that he was music production guy who taught himself tape music in the early 1960s and "was denied access to the major electronic music centres because of his lack of academic credentials." Dockstader self-released his own music and eventually acquired a rep and entered the canon. Dockstader used the term "organized sound" and that's what St Celfer's "STC.lives.solo12.2.9.21" reminds me of. There are similarities in timbres and moods. But whereas Dockstader was all about slow, painstaking studio assembly of multitracked sounds in a continuous-sounding flow, St Celfer makes the work in a single take. The "assembly" is making an instrument that creates its own variables and accidents and conveys an impression of dense multitracking."

www.tommoody.us/archives/2021/03/26/st-celfers-step-4d-instrument/ 

JENGHIZKHAN VS. CLONE ARE DENIM VENOM: 
THE UNION OF TWO OPPOSING FORCES, 
THE CATHARSIS WHICH ENSUES ... 
WIELDING AN ARSENAL OF LAPTOP SYNTHESIS 
AND PROGRAMMED SPONTANEITY, 
DENIM VENOM TEAM UP TO BRING YOU 
A BARRAGE OF COUNTER INTELLIGENCE DANCE MUSIC, 
PUNK MAYHEM & JUTTERING SPEEDBEAT.

clone vs jenghizkhan: ThatBlackSabbathSong

Currently: St Celfer (stcelfer.com)
Formerly earcon and jenghizkhan (John Parker, a member of Man From Planet Risk, !mooB He Goatan, and Spongeworthy) explores the sonic possibilities afforded by contemporary digital sound production by destroying sound files and re-composing them in 8 bit space.