Emma Peel For A New Milennium!

MERCYSIDE is Jennifer Brunetti. Singer, songwriter, keyboardist and award-winning filmmaker, Jennifer was born in Detroit during its days of riot and urban decay. Schooled at the prestigious Berklee School of Music, partner in an innovative New York film production company, she has cultivated an extensive network of fellow musicians from across the country. As a film producer/director she has worked with such artists as Donald Sutherland, Chris Noth (Sex and the City), and Jim Belushi as well as such industrial giants as Mercedes and Volvo.

Jennifer spent a good deal of her childhood in inner city Detroit before her father attained the means to move to the country. Young Jennifer left the canyons of steel and glass to roam the fields of blossoms. "My father built this great big house on top of a hill. I couldn’t believe it. It was this beautiful and peaceful world but lonely."

She now had the freedom to experience dislocation, isolation and culture shock due to living in the middle of the metropolis called "Nowhere!"

"I didn’t know any of the new neighbors in Milford. I couldn’t really see our neighbors. Of course I didn’t really fit in anyway. I would spend endless days playing the piano. Our first years in the country were quite strange for a once urban family. My father indulged in planting a garden large enough to feed an army, which took an army of 5 kids all summer to maintain. I hated school. The kids hated me, I dreaded the bus that would take us to school. It was pure horror, not knowing what harassment to expect from day to day."

In her teens, Jennifer Brunetti fell under the sway of Detroit. Longing for the city life of her childhood, enduring a happy family life in the country, Jennifer now found succor reliving the reassuring scenes of ethnic strife, class discord, and crime that she so enjoyed as a young girl. Jennifer returned to Detroit on many occasions during her teenage years, most often after her curfew, during harvest, and in the middle of the school.


Backstage

Jennifer’s father also retained ties to Detroit. He worked as the foreman for Cobo Arena in Detroit, which served as the showcase center for Motor City as well as a concert hall for the most profitable, rock shows. Backstage performances were the staple for young Jennifer. Capes, tongues, spurting blood, acrobatic young girl, a Polaroid camera wielding Gene Simmons in the company of his acrobats on one occasion, all provided for a powerful moment in an impressionable young women’s life. She decided then and there that she too would join a group of musicians; she too would provide succor and edification for the audiences. Brunetti wistfully notes of this moment, "My life was changed. I just wanted to be a part of the show," she states. "My show!"

Berklee College of Music: Preparing for a Religion

Upon graduating high school, Jennifer parted company with her fields of blossoms and the house on the hill. She went to Boston to attend the prestigious Berklee College of Music.

"I got bored with school, so restrictive, so regimental. It seems I left Catholic school just to be re-indoctrinated again. I went through the motions. Learned my theory, programming, experienced Boston’s jazz scene. But I just wanted to work. When I left Berklee I needed to make a living. I didn’t want to do the admin thing, but I really couldn’t make money in music. Well not unless I could score for film and video but my friends kept telling me I would never be able to do that. I got a job as a secretary at a recording studio. They fired me as a secretary. I was really was terrible since my mind was in the studio, not behind the reception desk. It did, however, get me in that magical door, and so I ended up doing sound effects for a movie in the same studio. I had also been spending late nights for free at a local production house teaching myself the nuts and bolts of editing. So I started producing videos. Now, I could hire myself to score them. Sort of a roundabout way of doing things, I know, but eventually I learned that I truly love making films and ever since I’ve never been able to decide between that and music. So I do both.

To me it seems like the most natural thing in the world. Vision and sound. It’s difficult for me to create either without having a sense of the other in my head."

MERCYSIDE.

Vision. Sound. Suffering. Freedom! Jennifer found that by combining all these elements, she could create a hybrid genre of dance music for lapsed Existentialists and practicing Post-Moderns and most importantly music for herself. Jennifer gratefully acknowledges the burdens of Catholicism, Nabakov, the Bible and downtown Detroit---after midnight---as her primary inspirations. She listens to the Velvet Underground, Nick Cave, Donavan, Portishead, Garbage, Funkadelic and the phenomenon of Rai music!