From the original mission statement:

MESMERA is a community organized around a shared improvisational language and devotion to engagement in typically clandestine operations seeking access to specific site/spaces and their associated objects/surfaces for the purposes of experiencing ephemeral trans-percussive events and/or producing shareable trans-percussive recordings.

To put it more plainly, Mesmera involves groups of people going to specific places and using only the things available there to do semi-improvisational drumming directed by a series of hand signals understood by each of the participants. In 2003, Mesmera was a living practice shared by myself and two collaborators who now live in other parts of the country. Sadly, all of the recordings we made then (on ADAT tape) have been lost. But the set of hand signals still exists a basic framework for improvisation in small ensembles.