Morgan Packard

Morgan Packard, a sound artist from Boston, New England, United States, has been working on electronic music in various forms for over a decade, using his classical and jazz training to inform what he does in subtle ways - whether it's drum and bass, a soundtrack for a modern dance performance, or his versions of abstract techno and ambient sound. While his music may be wrangled into the minimal category, he is actually eschewing minimal tropes in favor of highly wrought arrangements - fitting multiple sensibilities into music that could easily be mistaken for existing genres, though when explored carefully, hardly fits into any. Using the idea of techno/house/breakbeat music as a beginning, not an end unto itself, Morgan arrives at a sound which manages to include various ideas from the worlds of electronics, jazz, and classical in a manner that has no hint of experimentation, but rather a purposeful, concrete rendering of his vision - combining a composer's heart with a programmer's brain.

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.

http://www.morganpackard.com


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