released June 15, 2021

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...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.

Read more in the interview with Tom Moody: www.tommoody.us/archives/2020/12/04/on-breaking-the-square-a-conversation-between-john-parker-and-tom-moody/
youtu.be/ug5fTOqhTyY

St Celfer busking in São Paulo, performed at Marcus Leoni's studio. Nduduzo Siba, originally from South Africa, an expert in the traditions of Zulu dance, a resident of Brasil, joined them.
youtu.be/jwf51AazFBs

St Celfer's Space Between Points™ orchestrating 'Serenade No Cry' at The Shed
youtu.be/JbF0LVLRF6s

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WFMU
December 7, 2022: Energy Bars
wfmu.org/playlists/shows/122373
March 8, 2023: Marathon Drummer Salmagundi
wfmu.org/playlists/shows/125371
August 2, 2023: Dark Matter
wfmu.org/playlists/shows/130267
November 29, 2023: The Color of Noise
wfmu.org/playlists/shows/134396
March 20, 2024: Controlled Re-Entry
wfmu.org/playlists/shows/137980

ST CELFER's Step.4D™ @ Flotation Device, KBCS 91.3
[1:25:21]. St Celfer AKA John Parker: Ping Me Bjork. From Lives
www.mixcloud.com/flotationdevice/flotation-device-2022-06-26/

ST CELFER's Step.4D™ @ Flotation Device, KBCS 91.3
[1:29:23] St Celfer AKA John Parker: 61. From StC Lives 51-61-74
www.mixcloud.com/flo.../flotation-device-2021-08-01/

ST CELFER @ Radio Eclectus #74, Hollow Earth Radio 104.9
[16:04] St Celfer: Suite #6 - Etude. From Suites #1–9 with St Celfer AKA John Parker.
[18:24] St Celfer: Suite #3 - Dirge 1. From Suites #1–9 with St Celfer AKA John Parker⠀
Voice break with Charles Dodge: Earth's Magnetic Field
[29:30] St Celfer: Suite #7 - Serenade No Cry. From Suites #1–9 with St Celfer AKA John Parker⠀
www.mixcloud.com/RadioEclectus/radio-eclectus-74/

ST CELFER @ Radio Eclectus #35, Hollow Earth Radio 104.9
[8:30] St Celfer AKA John Parker: Prelude. From Suite #5
www.mixcloud.com/RadioEclectus/radio-eclectus-035-seattle-flu-mar-12-2020/

ST CELFER @ Radio Eclectus #29, Hollow Earth Radio 104.9
[27:55] St Celfer: Divertimento. From Suite #2
www.mixcloud.com/radioeclectus/radio-eclectus-029-radical-new-music-jan-30-2020/

ST CELFER @ Radio Eclectus #15, Hollow Earth Radio 104.9
SET 1: Sorey, Crispell and early Crumb
1. St Celfer: Impromptu. From Suite #2
www.mixcloud.com/radioeclectus/radio-eclectus-015-haas-sorey-crispell-crumb-oct-24-2019/

Step.4D tracks on Sydney's Eastside FM 89.7 May 31, 2021 Spirit House:
eastsidefm.org/episodes/spirit-house-800pm-31st-may-2021/#
eastsidefm.org/episodes/spirit-house-800pm-29th-nov-2021/

ST CELFER @ Tikrishow, IDA, Tallinn:
idaidaida.net/episodes/tikrishow-2021-10-29

ST CELFER @ oolongradio, Berlin (St Celfer, 51 from StC Lives I: 51-61-74)
oolongradio.com/archive

ST CELFER @ Audio Collision with Cadmium Red WOZO-LP FM 103.9, Knoxville, TN:
www.mixcloud.com/Cadmium_Red/audio-collision-with-cadmium-red-show-154-airdate-120521/

ST CELFER @ Urban Mutant, Vancouver, CA (St Celfer, Suite #3: Dirge 2 from Suites #1-9 ~ 27:30)
www.mixcloud.com/UrbanMutant/um182022-mothballs-of-fire/

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“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...
...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.”
Read more of Tom Moody's first impressions of the Step.4D™ here:
www.tommoody.us/archives/2021/03/26/st-celfers-step-4d-instrument/

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Read the conversation with Jess Henderson as part of the project, "Band of Burnouts":
www.schoolofcommons.org/publishing/st-celfer-interview-part-1/

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Guide to St Celfer's Musical Styles
puchokruch.art/2023/06/19/a-guide-to-st-celfers-musical-styles/

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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/en/wave-7/editorsnote7

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In connection with our interview posted earlier this week (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": 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.

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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 jollo.org/LNT/doc/pitahaya/.
The audiovisual performance runs from 3-6 PM Central on December 12, 2020.

Biographical information

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

Tom Moody is a New York-based artist (tommoody.us) and musician (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 rhizome.org/editorial/2011/dec/08/artist-profile-rene-abythe/
His website is at jollo.org/LNT/home/fanfare/

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St Celfer releases his Suites (stcelfer.bandcamp.com):
"Reflecting the swiftness of the virus’s outbreak throughout the world, March of the Covids by St. Celfer moves at a relentless brisk pace and is driven throughout nearly its entire eight minutes and forty-eight seconds by a clicky, sine-tone-like ostinato. Over this insistent rhythmic engine and the repeated, down-pitched sample of a voice intoning “Don’t stop it before I break down. You wouldn’t stop anyway”, St Celfer deploys a kaleidoscopic assortment of varied electronic textures with associated melodic motives in an 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. With prominent grooves throughout its duration strongly emphasizing the notes G and D, the tonal center of March of the Covids is firmly established at G. While DTMF (Touch-Tone)-like twirling gestures around notes A and B and singing, rubato meanderings around note groups C-G and G-D-E establish the piece’s major mode, hints of a minor mode darkness with the note B flat appear throughout the beginning and most prominently in repeated swells at the two minute mark."
Derek Kwan of Art Music Lit Space, Sacramento, CA

ST CELFER's March of the Covids, St Celfer Suite 8, Art Music Lit Space, Sacramento, CA