Browse by Artist: PACKARD, MORGAN

Artist:	PACKARD, MORGAN
Title:	Airships Fill the Sky/Unsimulatable
Label:	ANTICIPATE
Format:	CD/DVD
Price:	$20.00
Catalog #:	ANTICIP 002CD

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. From the opening title track's accordion lines to 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. 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 bends these lines to create something far removed from the original input. 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. 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. The DVD portion is in NTSC format, region 0, 36:59 minutes long; the music featured on the DVD is exclusive to this format.

Artist:	PACKARD, MORGAN
Title:	Moment Again Elsewhere
Label:	ANTICIPATE
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	ANTICIP 011CD

Morgan Packard follows his Airships Fill The Sky (ANTICIP 002CD) album with Moment Again Elsewhere, a culmination of a line of thought and musical practice. Using piano, accordion and saxophone along electronic textures, groovy, yet humble rhythms and the controlled chance of his homemade Ripple software, Packard searches for and finds a voice of his own. On many tracks he maintains a sense of bass-fueled club music while pulling it into an entirely other context, one that is far away from the dancefloor while letting the memories of it sway the results. The rhythms have a house/techno/breakbeat feel but with less heft, with a bleepy, downtempo character and movement without boominess, like four people clapping in their living room before heading out for the evening. Through this, he creates a sense of minor drama, the kind that doesn't call attention to itself, but sneaks up on you with its haunting, focused sense of melodic timing. It is honest electroacoustic music, using old instruments in a manner that retains their identity rather than allowing them to become a sound source to be obscured and fragmented. These pieces flitter with electronic touch-points but do not adhere to them as the sole direction. This is one of the great strengths of Packard's music -- to take his education and experience and use it to forge something new, to borrow from existing, codified ideas, and use those as a means of giving shape to his music, but as a guideline rather than a border. This sense of finding the means to structure oneself makes perfect sense in the context of his choice to program an application environment in which to work (which he has dubbed Ripple). It's not that he has figured out how to utilize software to arrive at the desired process, but that he has created software in order to be more conducive to the way he wants to make music. The results reflect the difference, with this album a product of not just sonic sensibilities but of the tools he has made to conform to a means of production. Mastered by Rashad Becker. Featuring artwork by designer Sarah Nelson.

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