soundpedro 2021 participation: UnƧightly [Sound Poetry] Till the Worlds End & The Tiger | June 5th Audioscapes Sinking Territories

Michael Mersereau (b. 1977) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Oakland, California. He uses the boundaries of genre in cinema and television, such as horror and suspense to create experimental sound, video, performance, and installations elevating those particular production elements to create absurd and uncanny worlds. Mersereau’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally throughout California, Mexico, Argentina and Canada. Mersereau is faculty at Mills College, where he teaches in the Music Department in the field of electronic arts.

Artist Location: Oakland, CA
Social Media: Artist Website | Instagram

Proposed work as accepted for soundpedro 2021:
Sound Study for Suspiria
The full feature of "Suspiria" by Dario Argento, with all sound replaced by similar sound spaces collected in the Bay Area, California and Montreal, Quebec. Each scene in the film is mapped to an aural environment, turning the sound track into a tense soundscape in stark contrast to it's original assault of music by Goblin. A transformation from terror to a haunting.

UHF Psycho-Memory
“UHF Psycho-Memory” is about my childhood growing up in the suburbs. Back then I would sneak out into the living room to watch horror films late at night. Before I snuck out, my father would watch WWII documentaries before going to bed, and though I didn’t know what it meant, there was often morse code in the documentaries as a signal that you were watching something about war. I always felt those as a haunting monster unable to move its mouth in terror. Falling asleep the sound of the tv and my memories would collide, metamorphosing into strange sonic dreams.

"UHF Psycho-Memory" takes the footage of old b-film, horror, and Spanish language horror and splices the film into audio cuts made by morse code which tells the story above in sound and text. The video component is on and old CRT color tv, while the sound is played across four speakers in the space. The audio and video itself is done in realtime by the software MaxMSP.