albums

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Moment Again, Elsewhere
forthcoming, 2010, Anticipate Recordings

Airships Fill the Sky / Unsimulatable (with Joshue Ott)
2007, Anticipate Recordings

Early Morning Migration (with Ezekiel Honig)
2006, Microcosm Music


singles and compilations

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Frozen
2009, Konque

Koala Party
2008, Dalaki (Remote Thoughts comp)

Green
2006, Goosehound, Minlove.com

Ploosh Remix
2004, Microcoms music

I approach performing as an entirely separate project from creating finished compositions. When I'm composing, I'm a perfectionist. I'm ruthlessly pursuing the sounds and structures I'm interested in, and will revisit details again and again until they feel just right.

I don't find it interesting to perform by simply playing back the sounds I discover during my composition process. I want a performance to have more life, more dynamism, more danger than would be possible if I had the same perfectionist approach to sound that I have while composing.

Instead, I approach performance as a much rougher, sloppier thing. I use techniques which allow me to have a huge amount of real-time control of the sounds I produce. I throw these sounds around the room I'm in, listening to what sounds good on the sound system, paying attention to what feels right for the vibe of the room. I trade compositional sophistication for spontaneity, the pure pursuit of the ultimate sound for the pursuit of the best sound for here and now.

I've played in a bunch of different countries, and a number of cool festivals. I seem to be lucky enough to at the point where people will fly me somewhere and pay me to play now and then. This is a great privilege.

Here is an example of what you might hear at a Morgan Packard performance.

• Live at #3b, summer 2009 play

Here's an explanation of who I am and where I came from. It's written in the third-person so that busy promoter types can cut and paste, not because I like to refer to myself in the third person.

Growing up in rural New England, Morgan Packard planned to be a jazz saxophone player when he grew up. After graduating from high school, he enrolled in jazz school in Boston. There he discovered that jazz wasn't the only cool music in the world. He quit studying jazz, moved to New York, and spent the next five years immersed in drum and bass music, which was the most explosively creative electronic music of the time.

Then he got tired of making only drum and bass music and studied western classical music and wrote little pieces for acoustic instruments for a while. He also learned how to program computers and started building his own music software. Programming his own tools allowed him to create sounds that no one else could make, and he began to feel like his own voice was finally shining through.

He started working closely with visualist/programmer Joshue Ott, and also found himself aligned with musician and label man Ezekiel Honig. Josh challenged him to write better software, Ezekiel challenged him to make an album for his label, Anticipate. His first solo album, "Airships Fill the Sky", pricked up ears around the world, got good reviews, and people started buying him airplane tickets to travel and perform in their cities.

His sound is characterized by constantly shifting textures, a minimalist approach to rhythm, unconventional use of traditional acoustic instruments, and a sensitivity to melody and harmony. While his music is influenced by dub techno, ambient, and other established styles, it is best understood on its own terms, rather than through the lens of genre.

Ripple is my main composition and performance tool.
Things about Ripple:

• Ripple is really good at randomizing and automating aspects of sound. Ripple twiddles knobs so you don’t have to.
• Ripple is built with SuperCollider. If you know SuperCollider, or are interested in learning, you can modify Ripple for your own purposes.
• Ripple automatically generates graphical interfaces for SuperCollider synths.

If you have questions about how to use Ripple, please join and post to the ripple_users google group.

If you’re already a SuperCollider wiz, you can just download the library (Ripple.init launches Ripple).

I make a little bit of money with my music, but mostly, I'm a professional programmer. I'm well versed in a healthy range of web technologies, with a focus on sophisticated user-interface programming. I love making a product that works well, looks great, feels good, and is driven by well-organized code.

email: morgan@morganpackard.com

facebook.com/morgan.packard

music/art: twitter.com/morganpackard
programming: twitter.com/pixelmorgan