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CD in 8 panel digipak
• 24 track analogue (23:41)
• Live at the Spitz (part 2) (19:00)
• Live at the Red Rose (3:24)
• Live at the Shepherds Bush Empire (25:33) mp3
total time 71:58
Cover photo by Juliet Singer
Released 2001
Morphogenesis started recording in January 1985 and this is our sixth CD release, coming 3 months after the release of Volume 1. Like Volume 1, this CD also contains excerpts from 3 concerts (all in London this time) and a studio piece. Morphogenesis play a few concerts a year, almost always in London. In fact we have only ever played outside the UK twice. Concerts have always yielded our most varied material, but until now our CD's have mainly documented our studio work. Both volumes of 'In Streams' redress this. Of the concerts; one is a whole piece from the Spitz concert organised by Eddie Prévost, then there is a short extract from the Red Rose which has a ominous feel to it that is only partially due to the hostile audience. Finally there is the whole of our Sonic Youth support gig at the Shepherds Bush Empire which also has some interesting audience reactions - the initial cheer of approval on this piece was not because we had finally started, but rather due to a well aimed missile from the front row.
ADAM
BOHMAN - prepared violinn and balalaika, objects
RON BRIEFEL - vocals, varispeed CD player, electronics
CLIVE GRAHAM - springs,
Uher tape machine, autoharp, electronics
CLIVE HALL - piano, objects, electronics
MICHAEL PRIME - water machine, biofeedback, radio, electronics
ROGER SUTHERLAND (RIP) - percussion, springs, piano
REVIEWS
AUDION
45
VOLUME 2 covers the more familiar (what I'd call) "typical" Morphogenesis,
with three vast sprawls that ooze and flow in that Stockhausen "improv"
vein (the more abstract Aus den sieben Tagen) meets AMM that almost
teeters on the edge of chaos. Gripping stuff (mostly), like a riotous
ride inside the brains of 6 creative sonic artists all attempting to
communicate with each others psychˇ. Generally it all works, with the
sonic synapses set to sizzle, except for a weirdly out-of-place moment
where it all goes kind of serious and "classical". There's also a 3¸
minute piece (intended for radio play - possibly) that doesn't really
get anywhere to speak of, and seems a might weak and out-of-place. Of
all the Morphogenesis recordings I've heard these two discs hold the
most "rasping" (i.e. buzzing and screeching) works that I've heard from
them, and thus quite challenging. They are also well-balanced with a
wide range of moods and textures. In all, they document the Morphogenesis
live sound really well. (Alan Freeman)
AVANT
20
Elsewhere in this issue, Fred Grand has written a keen review of
Morphogenesis's In Streams Vol. 1. Much of what he says about the music
is applicable to Vol. 2 and requires little or no elaboration from me.
Both CDs are excellent. Rather than map out similar terrain, I would
like to offer some general comments about the group and their way of
making music. What isn't apparent from the group's earlier (mostly studio-based)
recordings is how they respond to the circumstances of live performance,
particularly the mood of an audience. Clive Graham notes that the briefest
track on In Streams Vol. 2, 'Live at the Red Rose', has an ominous feel
"that is only partially due to the hostile audience". In July
2000 the group faced an especially bemused/hostile audience - one that
was considerably more vocal than the purse-lipped Red Rose crowd - when
they opened for Sonic Youth at the Shepherds Bush Empire. This piece
can also be found on Vol. 2. As the group's quasi-meditative gong and
bell-like sounds, piano rumbles and coarse electronic blurts gradually
rise above the restless hubbub of the crowd, establishing a sonic signature,
the audience quietens; they listen semi-attentively for a couple of
minutes or so, then begin to heckle and jeer. There is an unexpected
roar of approval as a missile lobbed at the stage hits its mark. Morphogenesis
respond somewhat in kind. They crank up the intensity and make more
aggressive, coarser-grained, less unified sounds than usual, and take
on the crowd. Interestingly, they don't choose the easy option of turning
up the amplifiers. By the 14th minute they've managed to quell the audience
and thin out the sound to achieve a kind of dyspeptic ethereality, and
as the piece ends they receive not only grudging applause but what sounds
like hard-won enthusiasm. This was an extremely partisan crowd: had
the group taken to the stage wearing Sonic Youth t-shirts they might
have received an altogether more favourable response. There is something
of the hive mind about Morphogenesis, though the musicians are no mere
drones. Roger Sutherland has said that his enjoyment of playing is never
greater than when the music feels most out of control yet sounds perfectly
controlled, when every single thing the musicians do works like a dream:
chaos made shapely, complexity made clear. Groups in almost every genre
of music strive to achieve unity, a tightness and tautness of sound
that's greater than the sum of its parts. But unity is of only minor
importance to Morphogenesis. Each player works principally on his own
sound rather than his relationship to the group sound. One could say
that when they play as a sextet there are six conceptions of Morphogenesis
in operation. But the group has an additional member: the muse of sweet
fortuity and happenstance. It is precisely because the musicians don't
try to make a Morphogenesis sound, but just allow it to happen, that
it does happen. (Brian Marley)
BANANAFISH
16
Not to imply that the two-volume 'In
Streams' doesn't warrant the most deluxe packaging possible, but it
would be polite to formally acknowledge Morphogenesis's courteous avoidance
of the boxset in favor of two discrete, eight-panel, full color digipaks
instead. Bravo for restraint, and it's still one hulluva spread.
Volume one collects performances from the late '90s - two recorded live
in London, one in Cologne, and the studio track 'Charivari remnant.'
Start here unless you've already been frozen in the center of an ice
block and thawed by ten-thousand heated centipedes. Otherwise, you'll
miss the shrieks of agitated head-footed mollusks transmitted by hacked
long-distance telecommunications motherboards. After Morphogenesis have
rustled the gag jewelry on your lumbar vertebrae, an elusive ringing
does wheelies throughout the central nervous system, with no guarantee
that paralysis will assist in reorientation.
Volume two collects four more performances recorded between mid 1997
and mid 2000, when no one surpassed the sextet at draping sprawling,
waterlogged tapetum over spiney shoulders of lymph-challengers waving
a black flag. Gong-pepper shavings drift down from the sky like fish
food in an aquarium, settling on boulevards slick with alien phlegm,
and causing a complex chemical reaction that yields light blue denatured
pus resembling sapphire pie crust. A map wouldn't even help navigate
the plumbing anomalies, mess hall assemblies, monorail prototype demonstrations
(pre-kink removal), arboreal growth spurts, ultraviolet snowplows, speculum-induced,
big-cat belches, freefalls through three-dimensional matrices of snorts,
snuffles, blurts and scrapes (with optional rebounds through pinball
machines).
With human error as the cornerstone of civilization, it's amazing that
in a group the size of Morphogenesis, no one fucks it up with bad judgement
or prolonged lapses of indulgence. 'In Streams' reveals just a few facets
in an ongoing montage that doesn't act like a montage because of the
collective discipline of Adam Bohman, Ron Briefel, Clive Graham, Clive
Hall, Michael Prime and Roger Sutherland, who improvise with a high
degree of coordination on enough home-made and hot-wired gear to fill
several wholesale outlets.
They selectively deploy prepared instruments, signal processing, purely
electronic sources, and non-musical objects; meningiomata, papillomaviruses,
and liquidy protrusions you could look up in 'Diseases of the skin'
get raked across bongo drum terrain, and digital goink meows vault over
the corpse of Count Amadeo Avogadro's body as if part of a score derived
from migratory lesions of burrowing nematodes and larvae, and it could
go on forever, easily. Unless it doesn't. (Seymour Glass)
FLUX
27
Six men hunch over piles of scrap, crap and expensive electronics, teasing
sounds from effects boxes, electrified houseplants and springs, barely
moving in the gloom ... Top-flight improvised electronics recorded in
various situations including a Sonic Youth support slot. Clive Graham's
live mix foregrounds each player in turn in a narrative which propels
the music beyond amped-up pottering. There is no jazzy interaction;
instead, a group sound builds up in an anarchic, spooky way. (Andi
Chapple)
FREQ
The impossibly lovely digipack opens like one of Mr. Prime's flowers
to reveal four live actions recorded and yet on first look the overwhelming
images are of motion and fatigue. There is a sense of workmanship in
these images - the recordings are living beings in themselves - a sense
of something happening. Breaths and slowly lowing metals and twisting
of gears. In headspace and out of it. The Kunstkopf. Short waves wriggle
through and past the other sounds writhing like Mongolian yellowworms
that haven't even been catalogued yet. The echo of the hall shadows
the proceedings, shattered into ebony fragments at the stringboard's
call. How much is processed? How much of these sounds are affected,
and is the finger which is at times leveled at experimental music seeking
for "honesty", however facetiously? A sense of whirling in a tube rattles
down the pike, along with the sonorous tones of the instrument. Which
one? A moot point - all sound is fair game and the hunters peck about
here and there, hither and yon, finding this one, bagging that other
one, no, over there, the one that sounds like a pachinko game on the
slow bus. Into a crescendo now, various tones mixing with scraping and
do sounds recognise each other, old friends in the marketplace, as they
pass one another in a recording? And now Freddy "Boom Boom" Pachebel
and his Canon enter into the background, playing over the sounds feasting
on one another... A more tentative moving around of sounds plays with
a highpitch, fast and inside, splaying behind it. Huntenmusik? The child
has six fathers and proceeds to awaken, crying (a little) and transmogrifying
into this gas bubble, that violin, that Drano. The ghost of a chants?
And the currency of the times - minutes, 19 of them, spins once twice,
landing on its edge. Police sirens, now, and voices. Clouds mass across
the stage and the Speaker-Eater raises its subjective head once again,
threatening, threatening...the thunderclap, and the audience's besides...
Gongs resonate and cheering for unseen sounds resonates, and the zebra
cries out in the vast zoo of sound as the band plays on. A massing menagerie
blends with the bird outside my window, and perhaps a mouse or two I
cannot see. Life and the recording have merged for this one free moment
and it's...well, it's quite nice, that. (David Cotner)
INTRO
Bereits seit 6 CDs verbessern sie die Welt mit warm-weichem Ambient,
ohne dafür je die gebührende Anerkennung zu finden. Dabei
ist der Sound von Morphogenesis ziemlich einzigartig und höchstens
mit den Noisemaker's Fifes vergleichbar, was nicht weiter verwundert,
schliesslich hatte es unter dem Namen Negative Entropy eine Collaboration
beider Bands gegeben. Basis dieses Sounds sind nicht zuletzt die Biofeedbacks
von Michael Prime, der schon mal für Soloveršffentlichungen mit
dem Mikro auf Fledermausjagd ging und dem Ganzen einen sehr organischen
Charakter verleiht. Hinzu kommen verstärkte Objekte, Elektronik
und Radio, die vor allem den ersten Studiotrack äusserst abwechslungsreich
gestalten. Es schliessen sich 3 Livetracks unterschiedlicher Länge
an, unter anderem ein Sonic Youth-Support Gig in London, bei dem der
Applaus nicht den morphogenetischen Soundscapes gilt, sondern den gezielten
Würfen aus dem Publikum (Sascha Karminski)
OPPROBRIUM
These two discs (76 and 72 minutes respectively) represent almost
the entirety of this group's activities over the past half-decade. The
practical difficulties of bringing together six members and all their
gear - the pictures which accompany the CDs will give you some idea
of the amount of equipment they employ - have ensured that their live
performances and studio recordings have become fewer and further between.
Long-time followers of Morphogenesis won't be struck by any radical
changes: the group's modus operandi - good old-fashioned group electronic
improvisation - remains the same. It's difficult to write about Morphogenesis
without resorting to shorthand or transcription, and indeed, this music
is often elusive, its essential nature and form seeming to mutate from
listen to listen. The material is all signature Morphogenesis: individual
sounds - always chosen and deployed with sensitivity given the potentially
limitless palette of sounds available - are either introduced or drift
into audio focus (depending on the member in question), are aligned
with or juxtaposed atop of and underneath each other, and then faded
or subjected to processing, the instrumental flow surging and receding
almost tidally. Many of the recordings are run through with glisteningly
fluid sound-wash, swingeing swathes of electronic noise, or churning
sonic grind, and all components layer themselves together into slippery
concoctions which seamlessly shape-shift with a befuddlingly natural
momentum, ready to head in any conceivable direction at any given moment.
It's a perpetual motion mixture of sound arrangement and real-time interaction,
a balancing act, each member's individual contributions poised with
unerring accuracy relative to each other within the surrounding hubbub. (Nick Cain)
The SOUND
PROJECTOR 10
The second
volume of In Streams, which was reviewed last issue; a must-purchase
for fans of this outstanding UK group, and for lovers of high quality
electro-acoustic. In some ways this even surpasses its companion volume;
more dynamic performances, and well recorded. The studio recording '24
track analogue' displays some of the most subtle group-working yet heard
from the Morphos; perhaps the studio environment is the best place to
capture the fine detail of their playing, particularly when dealing
with the smaller and more intimate sounds that arise from the scraped
bits of metal scattered on Adam Bohman's table of fun. On the other
hand, the full roarage and densely melded sound-alloys of the five-strong
combo leap to the fore on the intensely powerful 'Live at the Shepherds
Bush Empire' cut, from July 2000. Here, the Morphs did their best to
win over a sceptical Sonic Youth audience (an incident we won't dwell
on, as it's becoming something of an anecdote in avant circles). After
some slightly uncertain bowl-chiming at the start, they bring in the
nasty electronic big guns after three minutes, and never look back thereafter.
Of course, even over the course of the three years represented on this
comp, they still only ever play in one tempo - slowly, as slowly as
a big earthenware jar of molasses pouring down three flights of stairs
into the parlour below. But it doesn't matter. The variety comes from
the sheer quantity and volume of sound-events - ranging from the tiny
and abrasive to the majestic and sweeping - which the hard-working players
manage to cram into their impressive wide-screen vistas of sound. Imagine
five or six painters working simultaneously on a huge abstract canvas,
using anything and everything from single-hair sable brushes to hand-rollers
dipped in emulsion. And you still wouldn't believe what you're hearing.
Also here - the conclusion to the 1997 Spitz Concert, and a short three-minuter
from the Red Rose club. Decorated with a large number of full-colour
photographs (by Juliet Singer) of the artists at work, with their equipment
and ambience around them. One of these is a striking image of Michael
Prime 's bio-adapter equipment. (Ed Pinsent)
TESTCARD
#11 (translated)
Assembled from 'amplified objects', electronics, 'water machine',
radio, piano and other things that range from the smallest objects,
electronics and classical improvisation instruments, are the 6 piece
Morphogenesis with 3 live pieces and one studio recording. The improvisation
process follows an extremely dense, seldom nervous flow that develops
over long stretches a pleasant tension between the contemplative and
more disruptive noises which is best compared with the work of AMM.
Somewhat harsh 'cracked' improvisation (the Möslang/Guhl/Voice-crack
school) stands next to calm 'Arte-Povera' improvisation (comparable
to Kapotte Muziek), intense post-industrial sounds develop and mingle
with fragments of traditional jazz improvisation. With so long an established
history, it is hardly possible to talk about the Avantgarde because
even this form of the 'in between music' has a tradition, which in part
goes back over 20 years (like so many of the recordings from the LAFMS).
But it's not the novelty that matters here, but rather that the improvisation
sounds successful... even though the critics have been occasionally
doubtful and subjective in judging this. It has to be said that Morphogenesis
have selected only their really best live-performances for this CD,
because as far as richness and style, as well as tonal contrast and
dynamics are concerned these recordings are far ahead of the predictability
of most improv-productions. Therefore the AMM comparison at the beginning
had its reason: Only very few are successful in this. (Martin Büsser)
The WIRE
(July 2001)
British improv group Morphogenesis, now in their 16th year, run
a tight ship. Confident in thier course of action, they have relied
upon their collective strength, cohesion and integrity to sustain them
in the face of audience hostility, such as occurred when they supported
Sonic Youth at west London's Shepherds Bush Empire. The angry results
are documented on this new Paradigm Disc. Culled from live performances
on familiar territory in London betwen 1997 - 2000, their particular
blend of live electronics and communal improvisation generally suggest
conciliation rather than confrontation. This is music of rapt intelligence,
but it's not designed for an exclusively cerebral elite. These are performances
of depth, charm and variation.
The six musicians - Adam Bohman, Ron Briefel, Clive Graham, Clive Hall,
Michael Prime and Roger Sutherland - have diverse musical backgrounds
ranging from the purely academic to the full gamut of improvisatory
settings, with ensembles of pedigree such as The Scratch Orchestra and
Nurse With Wound. The range of sounds produced both from conventional,
albeit prepared instruments as well as customised ones, such as water
machine, springs and amplified found objects, would be fascinating enough
without the added complexity of processing, filtering and manipulation.
Morphogenesis's microcosmic soundworld is instantly recognisable and
thoroughly coherent.
Generating music from conventional and non-musical materials gives rise
to overwhelming timbral and textural variations. The provocative nature
of their output is also an essential ingredient. Sound is moulded like
fine clay, and the resulting artifact is then deliberately fragmanted,
only to be rebuilt into a new form from the recognisable shards. The
use of remote, ambient noises (the weather, the city), captured and
manipulated in real time to be integrated into the overall piece, gives
their music both its expansive temporal quality and its afterlife.
In the vanguard of experimentation and under close scrutiny in the crucible
of performance, one further quality is made manifest: honesty without
pretence. (John Cratchley)
VITAL
Second and final installment of a small series that provide us insight
in live recordings by Morphogenesis. This large group of improvisers
do not play live very often and if they do, it's mainly inside London.
Their releases so far were mainly culled from studio sessions. The six
members (who are in various combinations present) play a very wide variety
of objects, large and small , from tin cans to piano's and plants. The
pictures of the members in action on the front cover is certainly an
inspiring one for those who may want to try this at home. The CD opens
with a studio piece, which is an excellent, well balanced piece of scraping
noise, a bang on a cymbal and the sound of pushing a piano forward.
The other three pieces are all live, including a short excerpt from
a gig at 'The Red Rose', with a hostile audience and which finds Morphogenesis
also in quite a hostile mood. Best of these live recordings is the last
one, which Morphogenesis played to support Sonic Youth. Excellent recording,
well balanced sounds with occassional bleeps and drones, which all worked
quite well. Needless to say that I think they are a great band, and
I wish they would be showing their skills abroad a little bit more.
I can't be in London all the time... (Frans de Waard)