Recordings
Airships Fill the Sky CD/Unsimulatable DVD
Morgan Packard - Airships Fill the Sky
Morgan Packard + Joshue Ott - Unsimulatable DVD
Listen to samples here.
Morgan Packard’s debut solo full-length, Airships Fill the Sky, finds him folding cello, accordion and saxophone into a decidedly digital context - involving fragmented elements of techno, house, breakbeat oriented microsound and post-ambient tendencies - retaining his acoustic sensibilities in earnest, while taking advantage of his long-time immersion in a variety of electronic genres. While he has further honed the melodic, textural meanderings from some of his past work, here, Packard returns to his rhythmic roots, and continues to filter his jazz and classical background through everything he does. Deftly using his self-made software techniques, he puts these pieces together with a view towards the hypnotic power of the loop, coupled with a distancing from it. Remembering its importance as the structural basis of a musical landscape which has influenced him, he allows his loops to take on new properties, evolving incrementally and moving further from their origins.
From the opening, title track’s accordion lines into house bumps, to “Mink Hills” - with its symphonic clusters sitting harmoniously in layers of horizontal sound and clattering percussion pops - to the unabashedly funk-filled synth movements of “Waterbugs” - Packard manages to span a variety of musical choices and retain a coherence throughout. With a heavy emphasis on sound design - both in the close-ups of sonic minutiae and the wider swathes which cut across tracks - he exhibits technical savvy coupled with compositional inventiveness.
The accompanying Unsimulatable DVD provides a snapshot into the collaboration between Packard and Joshue Ott. Ott uses his homemade software, entitled superDraw, to wield a flexible, visual instrument. Using a digital drawing tablet and pen to input simple sketches of lines into the computer, Ott effects and bends these lines to create something far removed from the original input, nestling into a comfortable space of abstraction that is oddly familiar in its curiosity and fresh in its mannerisms.
superDraw examines and interprets the constant motion - both of the hand/stylus as it moves around the tablet, and of the line after it exists inside the software. This analysis allows the creation of movement that is inspired by the results of the original input, lending itself to a cycle of input/output that is consistently influencing and referencing itself, so that the blurring of the lines - both literally and figuratively - is part and parcel of the experience. What begins as a simple line becomes multiples of new shapes and angles, with often muted - and sometimes stark - washes of color running over and through contrasted black and white.
The collaboration between Ott and Packard (which includes almost exclusively different music from the CD) is the culmination of two years of playing live shows together and consistently honing their interaction and the means by which their computers communicate with each other. Though individual scenes can be devised beforehand, neither program allows deferred creation, so no editing is possible, and the entire piece had to be recorded live in one take.
Early Morning Migration
Ezekiel Honig and Morgan Packard - Early Morning Migration
The Early Morning Migration CD was the first collaboration between Ezekiel Honig and Morgan Packard, and fused tracks made separately by each producer into a uniquely focused, yet varying set of pieces filled with warmth, ambience, and real world soft techno edits. This 12″ is the first of two presenting some of the original CD tunes on vinyl for the first time, alongside more uptempo remixes.
Socks and Sandals take elements of various tracks from the original CD and rework them beyond recognition into a consistently moving, skimmed down techno opus. Bass figures motion to and fro throughout, underpinning the rhythmic skitters which are squarely reduced towards the discerning dancefloor.
Ezekiel Honig uses sounds from Tropical Ridges and Planting Broken Branches in a midtempo groover brimming with sunset melodies, whining , wheezing, and baggy effects, and clippity cloppy percussion. They all create the peripherals for what is at heart a different take on the same romantic ideals of the original tunes.
