ST CELFER (John MacDougall Parker)

ST CELFER John MacDougall Parker (New York City) is an American artist and avant-garde, experimental electronic musician - Wikipedia 

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1665 Norman St,
Ridgewood NY 11385



BANDCAMP NEW & NOTABLE (3 years in a row):
"ST CELFER returns with tracks culled from a series of live shows, each one a showcase for his inventive experimentalism." -- Bandcamp Senior Editor, 2023

"Seattle’s ST CELFER returns with four more boundary-breaking electronic compositions sparked with sudden bursts of melody." -- Bandcamp Senior Editor, 2022
 
 
"Seattleʼs ST CELFER writes immersive electronic songs that encompass both haunting beauty & wild experimentalism" -- Bandcamp Senior Editor, 2021

"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
"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



WFMU (New York):
Tikrishow, IDA Radio (Estonia): 29.10.21
Spirit House, Eastside Radio 89.7 (Sydney): 31st May, 2021, 29th November, 2021
Radio Eclectus #15, Hollow Earth Radio 104.9 (Seattle):
More: #29, #35, #74
Flotation Device, KBCS 91.3 (Seattle): August 1, 2021, June 26, 2022


"...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



"...create(s) a nostalgic, almost cinematic quality. In just under three minutes, ST CELFER manages to elicit a strong yearning for elsewhere" -- Infrasonica, Wave #7


"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

"These rough, harsh sounds are for me honest like a life...inherently unpredictable, imperfect, full of collisions and fluctuations in emotions" -- more by Puch Okruch


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



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