Sunday, November 27, 2011

you so promotional.


Ideally one would post about his gigs before they happened, but...yeah. There's one more date left on the current run: 19 jan 2012, at De Gouvernestraat in Rotterdam.

+++

http://wereallfortheunderground.wordpress.com/

Concept: Hillary Blake Firestone i.s.m Mark Morse & Floriaan Ganzevoort
Creation/ Performance: Hillary Blake Firestone, Mark Morse, Anat Spiegel
Light Design: Floriaan Ganzevoort
Technique: Floriaan Ganzevoort, Kees van Zelst
Advise: Igor Dobričić, Keren Levi, Sam Louwyck
Production: Martine Dekkers, Mara Tomanek
Co-Production: Grand Theater Groningen, nb Projects, Dansmakers
Amsterdam With support from Fonds Podium Kunst
Photo: Raymond van Mil
Graphic Design: cubicle-design.com
Thanks to: Stichting Studio Dok, Nicole Beutler, Wilbert Bulsink, Felix van de Vorst, Raymond van Mil, Jeroen Kimman, Thomas Myrmel, Clare Gallagher

+++

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

summer's kiss is over baby.



In actuality it never started up, did it. We had like 4 summery days this summer, and I think I was locked in a rehearsal studio for 3 of them. Total bullshit.

At least it's not like I have to switch back into work mode or anything now: we never stopped. But I'm not really complaining: August in Berlin was unsurprisingly fun and rewarding: our hosts at Podewil/sommer.bar/Tanz Im August were perfectly great, and our modifications to hardly resulted in something quite hallucinogenic and exhausting (in a good way), it was my favorite thing I've ever done onstage. We did three loops over two hours, the video above is loop 1 plus 7 minutes of loop 2. I'm really hoping we get a chance to do this again somewhere so we can try more loops...right now we imagine that 5 in a row (3.5 hours) could be possible.

Currently enjoying the luxury of a whole week off, and then it's back into the studio to get some work done on WAFTUG before we take this is hardly an invitation to Milano in October.

+++

Thursday, July 28, 2011

we need a reason to get drunk on a tuesday.





















I wish I could say that my non-stop working this summer was a calculated response to the relentlessly shitty summer weather we've been having (think 60F and rainy), but no...it's just a sort of mollifying coincidence, actually being inside when the weather makes you want to be anyway.

After the wildly successful Julidans/ILTWT excerpt/premiere of WE'RE ALL FOR THE UNDERGROUND (ok, it was at least "successful"), we took a whole week off, and now we're back in the studio (above) working on an adaptation of this is hardly an invitation for the Tanz im August festival in Berlin (tentatively titled this is hardly an installation, ha ha) wherein we transform the procession sequence into a live installation that destroys the stage and then cleans itself up and restarts as many times in a row as we can do it.

+++

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

double quartet.





















This Friday, 10 June, a potentially provocative assemblage of improvisors band together to share a bill with Talibam! at OCCII.

DOUBLE QUARTET (NYC/TRONDHEIM/BERLIN/AMSTERDAM)
Ab Baars + Louise Jensen (NYC): reeds
Mark Morse + Jasper Stadhouders: guitar
Tom Blancarte (NYC) + Wilbert De Joode: bass
Luca Marini (Berlin) + Tollef Østvang (Trondheim): drums

www.stichtingwig.com/abBaars/AbBaars.html
www.myspace.com/louisejensen
www.morsanek.blogspot.com/
www.jasperstadhouders.wordpress.com
www.tomblancarte.com
www.wilbertdejoode.com
www.myspace.com/lucamarini
www.myspace.com/tollefostvang

+++

Sunday, May 29, 2011

GLDMOG 2.0.

.

Sleep Gunner is at OT301 with Duke Garwood this Wednesday (1 June)...please come on out if you're not doing one of the other 17 things that are going on that night.

+++

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

honeytone meltdown.















(Photo: Raymond van Mil)

This is the encore from last Friday's Sleep Gunner gig at SMART. I was quite ill, victim of some kind of food poisoning thing, and I think my playing reflects a certain inner toxicity here. Since someone's already asked: besides a little tremelo at the beginning, there are no effect pedals here, just feedback and that underused bit of real estate on your guitar, the tone knob.

Sleep Gunner: Satan's Jeweled Crown (4:38).



Jeroen Kimman: harmonium
Mark Morse: guitar, handheld amplifier

+++

Sunday, March 20, 2011

unprepared.

So, I tend to do these solo studies when I have an impro gig coming up, because I really hate doing the same old shit all the time and these studies are an attempt to find something new to experiment with during the gig. This is going to be a set of two-minute impros on the 12-string neck, mostly unprepared, no effects, etc.

+++

Solo Study v-8.



Solo Study v-5.



Mark Morse: 12-string guitar

+++

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

multifingered.
















Before I started playing with other people again, back in 2007 or something, I was doing a lot of solo multitrack recordings, basically kind of playing with an idea for 2 or 3 minutes, then recording another take without hearing the first one, and then a third without hearing the first two, etc. Then I would nudge some things around in Sound Forge to synchronize events that were interestingly nearby each other. Anyway yes here are three of those kinds of things, probably recorded in 2006.

Wond.



Omeg.



Pipe.



Mark Morse: guitar, AudioMulch.

+++

Monday, February 28, 2011

in like a lion.













Or something like that. In the absence of having anything smart or funny to say, I'll post about an upcoming gig, two sets of improvised skronk with a nice band.


22 march 2011 @ zaal 100, 21:00uur, 5 euro entry.

Jasper Stadhouders: guitar
John Dikeman: saxophones
Onno Govaert: drums
Mark Morse: guitar
Nicolau Lafeta: trumpet

+++

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

six string tunings.

This isn't the most thrilling post on the block, but I've got to put it somewhere. I mess around with a lot of different tunings, but rarely ever write them down...or remember them. So, in an attempt to not waste my time by coming up with things that I then can't recreate, this little post will contain a list of these tunings, as I stumble across them. These are all from head-to-floor.

D, Ab, C, D, Bb, E

+++

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

love and sincerity.

















Koen from DNK kindly asked if I would play something for their Significant Music series on Monday, and the first thing I thought of was this, which I've written about elsewhere in slightly different forms...

UPDATE: I kind of just rewrote this again based on what I said last night at DNK. Now I'm done.

+++

In 1988 I dropped out of music school. I don't know if I ever really recovered from my time there, but by 1991/1992 the wound was still fresh enough to where I was having problems making music.

I was working at the Center for Music Research because I'd had the astoundingly good fortune to be in an airplane seat next to Steven Newcomb, who was running the place while working on the initial specification for HyTime, from which the HTML that you're viewing right now has borrowed many many concepts.

Regardless of the fact that I was missing the two main requirements for the job: 1) I knew nothing about computers and 2) I couldn't type, Dr. Newcomb hired me as a "lab assistant", which meant that I kind of sat around and watched people try to use email on UNIX terminals while an army of dot-matrix printers chattered nonstop in the background.

At the CMR I met Al Nelson, who was the other lab monitor and thankfully on the same frustrated musical trajectory as I was, and together to pass the long boring hours of lab monitoring we developed a kind of game, where we would search the music library archives for the most disturbing music we could find and then play it for each other on headphones, hoping to elicit some kind of visible physical or psychological response: a shiver of revulsion; clutching your ears in pain; falling to the ground; throwing up; bleeding, etc.

After a few months of this, the game no longer functioned properly: our tolerances for extreme sound and/or concepts had gotten so high that nothing was disturbing "noise" any more: everything was music. One day Al came into the CMR lab, where I was probably accidentally deleting a MicroEMACS message that I'd just spent hours typing (but to who? who else that I knew would've been on email in 1991? The only person I can think of is Al). He had an eyebrow-wiggling look of triumph on his face, and was brandishing something formidable-looking. 

Which turned out to be Dry Lungs V, a gorgeously scarily-packaged 2-CD compilation released on San Francisco's Subterranean Records. My sheltered suburban ass had never seen anything like it, and the noise tracks on there immediately and completely redefined my ideas about the useful limits of structure, texture, aggression, technique, you name it.

The sound of Masonna, Hijokaidan, Merzbow, Incapacitants, Solmania, K. K. Null, and Violent Onsen Geisha was threatening and and beautiful, but Dry Lungs was also my introduction to musique concrète via Un Drame Musical Instantane, Etant Donnes, and Helene Sage + Bernhard Vitet. It was also my first exposure to non-hiphop sampling (Carl Stone) and advanced feedback (Arcane Device), and that's not even everything.

That's Dry Lungs. In 1992/93, shortly after leaving Al and the CMR (I graduated), I found (for cheap) what has remained maybe my favorite nostalgic Osaka (I think) noise disc, Come Again II (on Kim Cascone's long-defunct Silent Records offshoot Furnace Records). This is easily on my list of Top Most Important Records Anywhere, even maybe Top 5. Actually yes Top 5. For me the track I played at DNK, Holy Screaming, remains utterly beautiful and primally transcendent...I've spent more than a few minutes rewriting this sentence to try and explain why, but trying to simplify it into something verbally describable seems to miss the point entirely.

Love and Sincerity: Holy Screaming.

+++

More Come Again II:

Flying Testicle: Testicle Rider.
K.K. Null: Song for Shimen.
Aube: D-Frost.

Incapacitants: Return of Black Monday.
Solmania: Gastropod GTO.

C.C.C.C.: Sweet Scanning

+++

Monday, February 7, 2011

tuesday's screwed.













I like nice easy accidents like this. This is David Bowie's Subterraneans mashed up against Lynyrd Skynyrd's Tuesday's Gone. I just dropped them both an octave and started them at the same time, fading in the Skynyrd. I'll hopefully get around to a more considered edit of this soon, I need it for a new theater piece.

Morsanek: Tuesday's Screwed (demo).



+++

While I was slowing things down, I decided to finally mess with the recently-ballyhooed super slowdown tool, Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch. It's...OK, if you're not looking for realism. The artifacts are nicely different. Here it is applied to a harmonium loop I've got bigger plans for.

Morsanek: WAFTUG Incidental (demo).



+++

documention.

Here's the recording of our gig at Oorsprong last week, three-fifths of The Family Tapes plus Christophe Scherbaum.

Plus electronics: Raph, Alfredo, and I have never really played together with effects before, it was surprisingly understated. You can't really tell how quietly we're playing until someone coughs or sneezes and drowns out the music for a second.

Oorsprong (40 minutes or so, 91MB).



Alfredo Genovesi, Mark Morse, Christophe Scherbaum, Raphael Vanoli: guitar/electronics.

+++

Friday, January 28, 2011

giggage.





















Well shit, Charlie Louvin just died. And I missed seeing him in Atlanta last year cause that damn Icelandic volcaner blew up, I had a ticket and everything. I guess one could read something into the slew of already-scheduled gigs coming up for our Louvin tribute duo, but...don't.

Here's a fullish list of upcoming gigs with various people.

+++

31 Jan 2011: OORSPRONG, Amsterdam. one set (I think) with Alfredo Genovesi, Raphael Vanoli (Knalpot), Christoph Scherbaum, me, all of us doing "guitar/electronics". Which I don't do very much anymore, I'm pretty sure my approach has changed significantly. I'll be the one with the tiny amps.

20 Feb 2011: OCCII, Amsterdam. Sleep Gunner. New arrangements and things we haven't played in a while.

01 Apr 2011: SMART Project Space: Sleep Gunner in some capacity TBD.

Also somewhere else, I'm forgetting. Better details soon.

+++