in the weeds again.

I guess I'm just trying to get these off my chest, maybe it's a cleansing thing.

These are primarily solo guitar pieces using AudioMulch, recorded in 2002-2003, and stylistically they have almost nothing to do with me anymore. Why am I dispensing them in this seemingly random or at least non-sequential order one might wonder, and the answer is I don't know.

This block of recordings is kind of an uncomfortable thing to share, because although I think there are a couple of moments worth preserving, my guitar playing was really in a total Shambles of Derivativity at the time, and for me these recordings are largely the sound of frustration, documenting some of the first tentative attempts to start figuring out a way out of the hole I was in, or, yeah, out of the weeds I guess.

+++

Morsanek: In The Weeds I (1:55), 4.4MB.

Morsanek: In The Weeds II (4:37), 10.6MB.

Morsanek: In The Weeds X (4:41), 10.7MB.

Morsanek: In The Weeds XIV (7:31), 17.2MB.

Mark Morse: guitar, AudioMulch, FruityLoops programming.

+++

in the weeds vi.

Still cleaning, still turning up old tracks. This is another from 2002-2003. There was a greater concept for these bits, but I was struggling with a multitude of factors at the time and nothing ever happened, a situation which could hardly be more generic, I know. But now that there is no greater concept, especially now that there's no visual component, I'm thinking about detaching that now-not-so-necessary generic beat underneath. I should also just totally ignore this overwhelming compulsion to fuck with old recordings.

Morsanek: In The Weeds VI (7:55), 17MB.

Mark Morse: guitar, AudioMulch, programming.

+++

archival footage.

Just unearthed a couple of old hard drives, I'll be posting some previously unpublished things here in a few, just 'cause. Most of this stuff should be from the period 2001-2005, years in which I was mired in a massive creative crisis and had almost completely stopped playing guitar, except to use it as an input to the AudioMulch patches I was semi-obsessively building.

+++

Morsanek: In The Weeds IV (2:46), 6.3MB.

Mark Morse: guitar, AudioMulch.

+++

i am sitting in a NastyReverb contraption.

Just got back from a long week in Berlin, long in a good way. One of the week's successes was the glitch-free debut of my new tiny laptop/guitar rig running AudioMulch. So I thought I'd post a Mulch MP3 or two, recorded last week.

I'm normally quite the anti-loopist these days, probably because I spent many years looping and just eventually became a bit fatigued by the sound of it and the playing strategies that it traps one into. But nonetheless these are a few loopy guitar improvisations through one of the example patches that comes with Mulch version 2.

It's a patch written by Christian Haines called lucier.amh, and it's supposed to kind of coarsely emulate the resonant frequencies techniques used in I Am Sitting in A Room, though here there are no real rooms involved: these are the resonant frequencies of one NastyReverb contraption and five two-second SDelays (along with a bit of "nice" reverb at the end of the chain, added by me, which I realize completely smooths over and destroys any remaining vestiges of Lucier's intended soundworld, but...I don't think I was ever aiming for that anyway).

This is a simple patch, but an interesting and useful way to degrade or erode a shortish loop. In each of these recordings I stop playing after about 3 minutes, which is a little too soon musically: if I'd had a bit more patience I could've paced the first five minutes better, but the sooner I stop adding new material, the sooner the loop can start to degrade, and that degradation is what these studies were about. So that means that in each study there's an absence of development from the 3:00 mark to 5:00 minutes while I wait for the resonance to kick in.

#15 and #14 below are super-friendly and modal, and the other two are a little less so. #11 and #12 are so similar it's worth asking why you'd include both, but I guess maybe it's educational to see what happens when you forget to include any lower pitches as I did with #11.

The other idea was to see what if any interesting wobbles happened with different levels of intentional dissonance. I also imagine that soon I'll try using more sophisticated "rooms" to see how we can end up in less predictable or more controllable places.

+++

Room Study 14.

Room Study 12.



Room Study 11.

Room Study 15.

MEM: electric guitar, e-bow.

+++