all fall down.

Yeah, yeah, cool. 2020!!! All links on this site are currently broken due to the crashing of the real website. 

Edit 2024: Almost all of the files referred to up here have been moved to either Google Drive: 
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1incjwp5l6yXS28V4g9_mrOp78NClctVw?ths=true

or the Cloud of Sound: 
https://soundcloud.com/markemorse

or both. 

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see below.

Still dormant, but if you just miss me or I owe you money or something you can catch up with me April 3 2020 at the Rewire festival in Den Haag with Leo Svirsky's River Without Banks, featuring Reinier van Houdt (piano), Rebecca Lane (flute), Germaine Sijstermans (clarinet), Marielle Groven (violin), James Hewitt (baroque violin), Catherine Lamb, Johnny Chang (viola torros), Seamus Cater (concertina(s)), Rishin Singh (trombone), Jeroen Kimman (pedal steel), Mark Morse (lapsteel). Aaron Lumley, Zach Rowden, Luke Stewart (upright bass(es)), Bryan Eubanks (RiverSynth).

Needless to say, this did not happen. 

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pause.

So this page/blog/etc is officially dormant. If you were desperate, truly desperate to know what I was up to, you could check my Instagram, but there are no real gig notices anywhere written by me despite the existence of actual gigs. The thing I'm mostly involved with at the moment is this, above is an excerpt from our Rotterdam show November 14, 2020.

ORQUESTA DEL TIEMPO PERDIDO
Floris van Bergeijk - synth
Salvoandrea Lucifora - tuba & trombone
Jasper Stadhouders - bass & guitar
Tristan Renfrow - drums
Onno Govaert - timbales & glockenspiel
Mark Morse - lapsteel + sampler
Jeroen Kimman - guitar & composition

audio recording: Jeroen Kimman
mix: Sandor Caron
video recording: Tristan Renfrow
video edit: Sjeng Schupp
Thank you.
mem

power-saxofoon.

Photo: Willem Schwertmann. There were indeed a few early walkouts, but tja at least we let them know right from the very first note that they weren't going to like it, hopefully they went on to do something they liked better that night.

40 people didn't walk out, it was a fun gig, everyone who stayed was lovely. Probably even the people who didn't stay were lovely too, but we'll just never really know will we.

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round 'em up.

Yes, no posting happening obviously. Just for reference, here are some things that happened on the internet that never got talked about here on this page and well frankly still aren't being talked about here on this page, but hey at least we've got links, that's something:

- Long-winded interview with Jeroen and myself in Guitar Moderne, talking about our youths, our gear, our Sleep Gunner, more gear, and Eddie Van Halen.

- Josh Rutner somehow devoted an Album Of The Week podcast episode to our Louvin Brothers record, it's super well done check it out.

- Somehow there's no information here about the two Bandcamp live sets we released, who's a big stupid. This is our set from Pisa where I was incredibly drunk due to, well, a lot of things, but an idyllic countryside setting with unlimited delicious wine and repeated start time delays were definitely contributing factors. Remarkably, the adverse conditions inside my body seemed to focus my mind and we did just fine. I'm sure the lovely and attentive audience and studio-quality sound in the Redroom did not hurt. And this is our set from Baarle-Nassau where we were all fired up about being on the road with Michael and Joost. Sound: less good, but performance: pretty inspired.

- Oh and there's an upcoming gig with the John Dikeman Trio here in Groningen, last time I was at an SJIG event it was wholly pleasant, a very friendly modern traditional jazz gig with Jesse van Ruller and his trio of stellar line-spoolers, Hope audience people are prepared for something sliiiiiiiiiiightly more raucous this time around, I'll cry if there are walkouts.

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on the road again.

Well, not really, but I am attempting to bring my "year" of non-performance to an end: 21 February I'm playing with the lovely and talented Jasper Stadhouders and Devin Gray in my old stomping grounds Zaal 100. We'll be playing with another trio made up of Eric Boeren, Frank Rosaly and a player to be named later (Editor's Note: Giuseppe Doronzo), then both trios together in a sextet.

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binary information.

More DJing, and a Sleep Gunner gig or two coming up.

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don't squawk.

Two gig notices:

12 Mar 2014: Sleep Gunner @ Butcher's Tears, Amsterdam. Doors 9pm, we're on first.
28 Mar 2014: (dj) morsanek @ BIMhuis, with ICP Orchestra, Ethan Iverson, and so much other cool stuff that I don't even start playing until midnight.

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none more black.

Welcome to the whitest blackness around whatever that means you cryptic sonofabitch. Still no live performance due to innerspace turbulence but yes, if for some reason you would be looking for the sound of my guitar, it can for now be most efficiently located over at The Cloud of Sound.

And ah yis, this post over at Tone Fiend regarding the evils of talk boxes made me want to post this track from our as-yet-unreleased Sleep Gunner record (entitled, yes, "Plays The Louvin Brothers Songbook, Vol. 1"). We took this sweet song from 1957 and made it a touchingly moronic talk box duet for dobro and keyboard. And I take an especially moronic guitar solo. With the talk box, sorry.

For tone fiends curious about the mechanics of it all, and who wouldn't be: I'm playing a gaudy-as-fuck, made-in-China Dean slimline gangsta dobro run through two shitty amps, one signal path includes a ZVEX Fuzz Factory and the other goes to Jeroen's vocoder box thingie that I don't know the name of. There's also a close mic that's supposedly picking up the acoustic sound of the dobro, but this didn't prove to be very useful because this dobro is kind of terrible. I do like the way that the loudest sound being picked up by this mic is the flimsy bridge on the Dean complaining during the guitar solo, it's a resonated creaking sound, the Chinese bridge threatening to give up if there's any more string bending.

Sleep Gunner: New Partner Waltz. (7.0MB, 3:01).

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monoták @ mediamatic.

My last gig for a while, taking a long break from live performance.

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Monoták @ Mediamatic
Echokamer #2

Anat Spiegel - May My Mirror 
A duet for two voices performed by Kevin Walton and Anat Spiegel

Ivo Bol - The Gasometer Universe 12 
The Gasometer Universe is a sonification of the big bang theory, a composition for live electronics and natural reverb. It was originally composed for the 117-meter-high Gasometer in Oberhausen.

Natalia Domínguez Rangel - Scholia (world premiere) 
Acoustic piece performed by Bart de Vrees (percussion), Miriam Overlach (harp) and Annie Tangberg (vc), a trio also known as Hoorcomfort. 

Paul Glazier - Compression 
A 78rpm record starts to play on an old, hand-cranked gramophone player. A mic records the music interacting with the surroundings. This is delayed, played back, and compressed, the acoustics of the space feeding back into itself.

Pandelis Diamantides - #008000 
Bleeps, microsounds and infrabass. A taste of paradise in binary language. With visuals by Emmanuel Flores Elias.

Light Metal Duo 
Light Metal Duo uses the resonating qualities of aluminum foil in combination with a personal sonic approach to their instruments. They work on structured improvisation ranging from drone-like clusters to pulsating, rhythmic patterns.

Thomas Myrmel - Dasein in Fieri 
We end the evening with a slow meditative piece for harp, voice and electronics.

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cinesonic @ goethe institut amsterdam.

Next Friday, 12 April, fellow guitar-toucher Raphael Vanoli and I will accompany three shortish videos from Argentinian filmmaker Sebastian Diaz Morales as part of the |cine|sonic| series at Goethe Institut Amsterdam. The films themselves are intriguing: hinting at menace and almost casually beautiful at the same time, with a non-obvious editing logic/rhythm that I'm looking forward to playing with/against. And this is the first time Raphi and I play duo together. €5 to get in, go time is 8:30pm.

LATER: A super-pleasant evening, well-attended and even paid. Great staff too. Interviews with Raphi and myself here, and with the filmmaker regarding how he thought it all went here.

Well, here is the interview with Raphi and me just in case:

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By Bas

On a rainy Friday night in Amsterdam, two men are building up a vast array of effect pedals and amplifiers in preparation for the 45th installment of Cinesonic. Tonight three short films by Sebastien Diaz Morales will be provided with a new, original soundtrack by guitarists Raphael Vanoli and Mark Morse, for whom this occasion also marks their first ever collaboration as a duo.

'So what do you think?' Mark asks Raphael, concerning something probably to do with one of the many cables and amplifiers scattered around the floor of one of the Goethe Institute's stately halls. 'Shoes off', he answers, removing his soaked footwear. Everybody made it to the venue through what one could call a spring shower, but this was soon forgotten after everybody settled down in a beanbag with a cold beer, ready to be taken on a trip through Insight, Oracle and The Apocalyptic Man.

After their show, we sat down with Mark and Raphael to ask them all about their Cinesonic adventure.

So what did you think of the show?

Mark: Most of it went really great, although great is a strong word for me, but I enjoyed it. The thing that’s hard to do in a duo situation is to have two people attuned to the same cuts, because we will interpret what's on screen differently right?

Raphael: It was good. I would have liked to sit somewhere else though, because I was feeling a bit claustrophobic, between the table in front of me, my pedals and the wall. I did like the fact that we were really next to each other though, even without looking at each other it was easy to communicate. From the corner of your eye you'd see something happening next to you and kind of know what the other was up to.

How did you prepare for tonight?

M: I probably watched the movies three times each. When I watched them I looked for cues more than anything, since I knew I wasn't going to be able to memorize all of it. In my mind I divided it into sections, and like for the first one I knew I had about four minutes here, and four minutes there, and tried to develop things over that. The first film for example ended with some imagery from the beginning, so I wanted to bring back some of the material from the beginning.

So none of the music was composed in advance?

M: I didn't actually play anything I had ever played before, but I knew what kind of feel I wanted to create in each section. With improvising to film its really easy to just start improvising without the film, I wanted to try really hard not to do that.

R: We could have written a score, but we do this only one time, so it's also a practical choice to improvise. Though the material we played was improvised, there was kind of a general feel to the films, obviously you are making sound to an image that has a certain atmosphere.

M: I knew the color and feel of what I wanted to play. I also played some things that I would never ever play, like in Oracle I played some really chordal melodic things that were too Bill Frisell-y at some point, I would never ever do that normally but it seemed like the right thing to do.

You're surrounded by all kinds of effect pedals and musical devices, could you explain something about the material you used during the set?

M: Well, I only have five effect pedals, but I do have a lot of implements to attack the guitar with. For example, I use a lot of pieces of foam to mute the strings on my guitar. And there is this metal file thing, which creates a really abrasive bowing sound, and i use this big knitting needle, because it is big enough to go through both necks. You know these Ebow things? If you just Ebow it with just the open strings it's kind of boring, but with this needle through the strings you get all these unpredictable, raspy, horrible sounds.

Though you are both guitarists, tonights show was not your average guitar-rock-show, any thoughts on this?

M: Yeah, I don't really often play with effects, so this is unusual for me. Mostly tonight there was a lot of reverb and a little tremolo, some distortion, nothing too crazy on my part. I feel like I'm playing guitar.

R: I was playing guitar all the time, actually. You're a musician, and you use instruments to make music, you should not see it as different things, its all one. All this stuff (pointing at the heaps of pedals in front of him), this is just an extension of your instrument. Of what we both did, almost everything was sourced by a guitar. It's not our business to give all this stuff a name, that’s up to you.

M: I think I played a lot of guitar sounds, thats kind of what I do. The thing that’s different when you play without effects is, you treat space differently. With effects it’s really easy to just turn up the freeze knob and have something happening when you’re not playing anything. It's just taking a millisecond of what you did and just extending it forever, and when you're playing without effects you have to think about space differently.

Thanks a lot guys, any future musical endeavors we should look out for?

M: I'm actually taking a break from music soon. After this I have one more show planned and then I plan on not making any music for a while, it's just giving me too much stress to make it all happen. So no future musical plans for me at the moment.

R: Well, there's a lot going on right now. The project that still keeps me the busiest is my duo Knalpot, we just wrote a new album, and now were looking for a new record company to release it. 

And for the first time I have a band that I conceived myself, with a great singer from Senegal and a brass section. None of them play their instruments in the way you would normally play it, they use effect pedals and have some really extended techniques. It's some kind of African space dub noise music. A lot of stumbling grooves, trance elements and weird electronic sounds. It’s all about sound and melody.

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do you have ears in your mouths?

Remind me to tell you about this one...

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café flambé presenté:

Lisa Cay Miller - piano
Yedo Gibson - horns
Anne La Berge - flutes
Oguz Büyükberber - clarinet
Wilbert de Joode - bass
Mark Morse - guitar

time: after dinner, around 8pm
entree: gratis

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ntr the draggin.

Above: soundcheck for May 2012's Zaal 100 gig, L to R: Wilbert de Joode, Ab Baars, Jasper Stadhouders, Felicity Provan, me as Dracula, Michael Moore, Michael Vatcher, Joost Buis. Photo by Jeff Kaiser.

This here blog is pretty much out of control and out of date, I guess out of most things....I'll either clean it up here in a bit or do something else. For now, relevant recordings are appearing on SoundCloud here:

https://soundcloud.com/markemorse

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crushing your bits.

Looks like I'm officially DJing again after an almost five-year hiatus? Sheeeeeeeeeeeit. I'm pretty sure there must be some upper age bound for this job, and I'm equally sure I'm approaching it. But until then.....vee dansks!!! Or brood, or, you know whatever.

26 October 2012: Delicatessen @ Wilhemina Pakhuis, co-produced by STEIM: CD release party for Bandwidth ft. Gerri Jaeger; Robert van Heumen.

14 November 2012: AUXXX presents 2 xxx 3 @ OT301, with Knalpot ft. Hilary Jeffrey and Jozef Dumoulin Trio.

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And zen I play guitar on 13 November at Zaal 100 with Ig Henneman (viola), Alan "Gunga" Purves (perc), Lori Freedman (reeds) and Anne La Berge (flute).

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the softer side of super hardon collider.

It looks like the Super Hardon Collider session is just maybe going to be made into some kind of release of some sort, hopefully mixed by Dog Faced Herman Colin, yay.

Here's a bit of it, mixed by Rune and tweaked by me, followed by an outtake experimentally mixed by me that probably won't make it in.

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Magnet Quench. (6.7MB, 2:50).



Suit Of Armor. (7.8MB, 3:23).



John Dikeman: tenor sax
Rune Lohse: drums
Mark Morse: electric guitar
Jasper Stadhouders: electric bass

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another look.

The Sleep Gunner is trying to record a record next week, and in preparation for that we're rethinking some arrangements. This is really just an impro that happened while I was seeing how my Octava condenser sounded with the dobro, and the answer is "thin and crispy". But the approach to SJC is maybe useful for something. And yes that's the sound of traffic outside.

Satan's Jewelled Crown. (5.3MB, 3:15).



 Mark Morse: dobro, laptop

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today's turgid episode.

Recording session this past Sunday with the beguilingly machoesque Super Hardon at Jottem in Wormerveer. Here's a tiny excerpt of the rough stereo mix, just a little Ferox analog overload added for that "we're really loud" feeling and some OmniSone side gain to bring the guitars up.

Blue Booby. (4.3MB, 2:15).

John Dikeman: tenor saxophone
Rune Lohse: drums
Mark Morse: electric guitar (right)
Jasper Stadhouders: electric guitar (left)

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de kortste nacht.

From relaxed 8pm soundcheck through scarily underattended 10:40pm opening notes (due to scarily lightning-attended storms maybe?) to engaging 1am Xenakis to desperately necessary 5:30am croissants and multi-amplifier guitar solos. To....yes, 12noon hangover. It was a pretty fun night. Also a bit, mmm, "special" due to the fact that this room is where we had our first gig together back in 2008, almost four years ago, and every time we play here seems to be generally pretty satisfying.

And in the aftermath? Spirits remain pretty OK, and Coming Up Next: the wagon. And two recording sessions. I'll take pictures.

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saturate.

An improbable glut/surfeit of gigs coming up. Yeah I said surfeit. Also, Sleep Gunner has a new website.

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23 Apr 2012: Oorsprong, Amsterdam. With Jan Klug and Bart de Vrees.
29 Apr 2012: Pakhuis Wilhelmina, Amsterdam. Sleep Gunner (Soirée Poirée).
03 May 2012: Dokhuis Gallery, Amsterdam. Superhardon (w/Jasper Stadhouders, John Dikeman, Rune Lohse).
13 May 2012: Budapest OV (SOTU Festival Amsterdam): Sleep Gunner.
15 May 2012: Zaal 100, Amsterdam. With Ab Baars, Michael Moore, Felicity Provan, Joost Buis, Wilbert de Joode, Jasper Stadhouders, Michael Vatcher.
24 May 2012: Bonte Koe, Utrecht (Casa Rosa). Sleep Gunner.
26 May 2012: De Nieuwe Anita, Amsterdam. Sleep Gunner.
12 Jun 2012: Red Light Radio, Amsterdam: Sleep Gunner is live on the radio bitches.
14 Jun 2012: OT301, Amsterdam. Light Metal Trio.
21 Jun 2012: SMART Project Space, Amsterdam. Sleep Gunner (Splendor: De Kortste Nacht)...SMART has a pretty amazing program that lasts from sundown to sunrise, don't know what time we're playing yet.

After this let's all take some time off.

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disable.

Above: today's recording setup.

Below: Let me explain. Though he's certainly made plenty of bullshit music, I've liked/admired/been confused by Keiji Haino's guitar playing in Fushitsusha for a long time. His solos (especially in the early live recordings) are totally mystifying: definitely arranged in phrases, but in a language that is primitive and atonal to the point of sounding completely deranged or chemically disabled.

It's a style that I've tried to emulate before, but only in a kind of unconsidered, half-assed way. I'm going to try and eventually record some more fully-assed attempts here, but this is the first.

Haino Study. (2.2MB, 0:55).



Me: Guild hollowbody, Fuzz Factory, ebow.

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