Blue Mercury was recorded at the Experimental Television Center in July 1986. A year had gone by since making Bad Knees. After living for a year in Owego, building hardware for the Center and developing my own synths at the same time, I had moved back to NY in the summer of 1985.
At the center we often saw recording as documentation of a real time process, one that could exist as performance without ever being recorded. A patch would go in, you would work and rework it, until it gets recorded and then another and another. My edits almost entirely followed these sequential recordings chronologically, with a great deal of the documentation cut away.
Blue Mercury turned out to be recorded in a session that was my last trip to the ETC as a resident. Like Bad Knees I cut a super short 3 minute edit that I showed around for a while. The title was inspired from the first segment, after that the rest of the work veers toward a bloody place.
I later made a 15 minute edit of this material for an installation that was shown a few times, finally it evolved into a collaboration with Charlie Citron. We first showed it at Monte Video in Amsterdam and then in 1991 at the old Thread Waxing space.
see:
blog.lumpybanger.com
lumpybanger.com
