ST CELFER


WFMU (New York):
Radio Eclectus #15, Hollow Earth Radio 104.9 (Seattle):
More Michael Schell Shows: #29, #35, #74
Flotation Device, KBCS 91.3 (Seattle): August 1, 2021, June 26, 2022

SÃO PAULO September 22, 2023 Instituto de Artes da UNESP
SXSW Overflow Fest, March 18, 2023, Super Happy Funland
BANDCAMP New & Notable 2024: Always inventive, always challenging sound artist St Celfer returns with another album of glitchy experiments to dazzle & fascinate.
"ST CELFER deploys a kaleidoscopic assortment of varied electronic textures with associated melodic motives in a free, improvisatory fashion, recalling landmark jazz fusion and minimalist albums of the late 1960s and early 1970s such as Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew and Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air."  -- Art Music Lit Space, 2021
 ***more here***
"That plaintive, recurring “soprano sax” riff in “Serenade No Cry”...If you were a soundtrack composer this would be audio gold.
...at times it reminds me of Charles Ives with several ensembles playing simultaneously, and motifs fading in and out of our attention. But the "sax" glues it together, gives it direction, keeps my ear engaged. Edward Tufte, the design guru, talks about the use of "confection" in a design, some sweet formal hook that helps to bring boring data alive in a chart or graph. Like a pretty color, or symmetry, or something nice about the line quality. For me the sax is the confection." -- from the Conversation with Tom Moody
BANDCAMP New & Notable 2021: Seattleʼs St Celfer writes immersive electronic songs that encompass both haunting beauty & wild experimentalism.see front page here (thank you fanfare)

June 6, 2022 (@Bandcamp - https://t.co/RX1PRhO68q ) archive: https://archive.ph/rAzu7
***more here*** BANDCAMP New & Notable 2022: Seattle’s St Celfer returns with four more boundary-breaking electronic compositions sparked with sudden bursts of melody. https://t.co/RX1PRhO68q
"There is a lot of noise today. I wonder if we just need to hear the music within it." -- in the interview by Jess Henderson for the School of Commons

BANDCAMP New & Notable 2023: St Celfer returns with tracks culled from a series of live shows, each one a showcase for his inventive experimentalism. https://t.co/0JhQ4u6VHA pic.twitter.com/xAMLm8LOEH

"...I think of ambient as minimal work ("a tint" to use Eno's phrase) and ST CELFER's is more substantial. "12" is atmospheric but has structure...
...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...
Dockstader used the term "organized sound" and that's what ST CELFER's "12" 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." -- from tommoody.us
The archive of invert/extant, Transmissions, In Our Own Words:an ongoing feature where artists and writers are asked to speak about their new work, ideas or projects in their own word is below: 


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

Drawings in the collection of Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC USP):

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE St Celfer Performance at ICOSA Collective, December 12, 2020

Austin, TX

St Celfer’s musical work “March of the Covids” will be performed at the ICOSA space in an unusual way – as an abstract, encoded YouTube video. The song made its original appearance at the Casagaleria art space in São Paulo, Brazil as a 16 channel audio composition “distributed” in the gallery through directional speakers. At ICOSA the work will be presented virtually in the form of video projections, in a new, collaborative incarnation. “Covids” will be “played” as one of a suite of recent compositions by St Celfer, who is currently based in Seattle, and his long-time collaborator Tom Moody, a New York artist and musician. 

Eleven tracks by the two artists have been converted to video using Pitahaya, a software program created by John Romero. Pitahaya turns the audio (which can still be heard) into a stream of random pixels resembling TV snow and QR codes. Uploaded to YouTube, the 35-minute video will be played by the gallery and may be watched like a Stan Brakhage-like abstraction, with fluctuating, chaotic correspondences between picture and sound. The video has embedded content but there is nothing subliminal or mystical about it: instead, Pitahaya has been used to convert a CD-quality version of the eleven songs, which can be downloaded and decoded as explained at http://jollo.org/LNT/doc/pitahaya/.

The audiovisual performance runs from 3-6 PM Central on December 12, 2020.


Biographical information

St Celfer has drawings (http://stcelfer.com/) that have been recently acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art, São Paulo and has an upcoming release of “9 Suites” (https://stcelfer.bandcamp.com/). He has exhibited and performed primarily in New York as John Parker (https://eyekhan.com/) among other aliases.

Tom Moody is a New York-based artist (https://tommoody.us) and musician (https://tommoody.bandcamp.com/). Most recently his work was seen in the exhibition "PAUSE (prelude)" at Künstlerverbund im Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany.

John Romero is an artist and programmer who was a member of the Computers Club collective (under the name Rene Abythe) and was profiled on Rhizome.org at https://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/dec/08/artist-profile-rene-abythe/

His website is at http://jollo.org/LNT/home/fanfare/

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In connection with our interview posted earlier this week (https://www.tommoody.us/archives/2020/12/04/on-breaking-the-square-a-conversation-between-john-parker-and-tom-moody/), and our video projection in Austin, St Celfer (aka John Parker) and Tom Moody are pleased to announce the release of our new LP, "eleven tracks": https://stcelferandtommoody.bandcamp.com/album/eleven-tracks
St Celfer and Tom Moody have been collaborating off and on since 2004. In this release "eleven tracks," each artist chooses several recent songs by the other and discusses them. [You can] click or tap the individual songs to read commentary about them. "On Breaking the Square," a 10-page dialogue between the two musicians about their work, philosophies, and "how they got where they got" in the past 16 years accompanies the digital version of this release as a bonus item (PDF). Cover: Tom Moody, made with "Epson Print CD" and incorporating a detail from a video realization of his track "Melding Principle (Three Nebulaes)," employing John Romero's encoding/decoding program Pitahaya.
"These rough, harsh sounds are for me honest like a life...inherently unpredictable, imperfect, full of collisions and fluctuations in emotions" -- Puch Okruch

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