Between 2015-2018, Marcia Custer’s clown-child alter ego Stacey performed and toured extensively, culminating in the release of full-length album Stacey’s Spacey (2018, Unifactor). Stacey performed at Elastic Arts Chicago, Pitchfork Music Festival, Voice of the Valley, SideSplit Sideshow, Sonorium Sound Festival, and the Mutual Irradiation Series.
The Stacey Years highlights Marcia Custer’s raw experiments with confrontational performance tactics, improvisation, and aggressively feminist approaches to embodiment, vocalization, and alternative sound technologies + composition.
Stacey’s Spacey, now out-of-print and sold-out, received critical acclaim, and was featured on Bandcamp’s top 10 Best Cassette Releases of 2018 (Marc Masters).
An excerpt from Stacey at Savage Weekend, 2018
cover of Stacey’s Spacey by Pat Modugno
“How ya Doin’” by Marcia Custer
Stacey’s Spacey
Unifactor 2018
Video by Christine Janokowicz
Stacey’s Spacey
“Cleveland-based sound and performance artist Marcia Custer makes her recording debut with Stacey’s Spacey, a tape suspended somewhere between overloaded noise collage and twisted Casio pop songcraft, all topped off with the vocal histrionics of a exaggerated femme persona known as Stacey. While speaking or singing as Stacey, Custer dips into flights of crooned baby talk, valley girl vocal fry, and maniacal yelping. Far from the realms of shock humor and irreverence, her pieces land as pointed takedowns of misogyny and general idiocy, both inside and out of the “noise scenes” / “art worlds” that Custer inhabits. Her monologues, woven within peals of synth noise and bursts of peppy keyboard melody, fuse together tropes from the vocabularies of children’s entertainment, self-care / mental health advocacy, depersonalized corporate jargon, and Stepford Wives suburban vapidity. Presented as a flowing narrative that encompasses everything from bursts of throbbing industrial grit to a cheery, chipmunk-toned conversation with a personified keyboard named Barb La Croix, Stacey’s Spacey shines with Marcia Custer’s unquestionable magnetism as a vocalist, her sublime timing as a comedian, and her wild tonal sensibilities as a noise head.” (Unifactor 2018)
"The results on Stacey’s Spacey are hilarious, moving, unsettling, and mesmerizing. Custer shifts deftly between childlike melodies, weird electronics, and abstract soundscapes. Some other characters emerge as the songs progress, and though the tape’s narrative arc isn’t totally explicit, it’s marked by consistent motifs, especially Custer’s infectious sense of humor."
- Marc Masters, Hi Bias: Notable Cassette Releases on Bandcamp, July 2018
"It's actually these dichotomies that Custer does well to eradicate, segueing fluidly between pain and playtime, seriousness and parody, noise and melody, comedy and horror. This is one real nutball of a debut - her live shows must be great."
- Tristan Bath, Spool's Out: July's Best Releases On Cassette
"...if NKOTB released something as wildly entertaining as “Stacey’s Spacey,” they might find themselves back on top!... Nothing short of showstopping... Warbling melodies and samples, noise and pitch-shifted vocals all coexist in the cramped alternate-reality children’s madhouse of Custer’s mind.... Mike Haley went so far as to admit to me in an email that “Stacey’s Spacey” was “literally [the] first tape my kids liked.”
- Ryan Masteller, Tabs Out Cassette Podcast
