Morris - Rippling - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Jeff Morris's second album, With Strings, explores the possibilities of 21st-century counterpoint. He builds up rich musical textures by sampling violin and cello live and folding them back into the mix, influencing the performers in turn. German electric cellist Ulrich Maiss, a former collaborator of Lou Reed and Al Di Meola, joins Morris on B4ch1007 (InchBach LootInch). The piece is a vivid, glitchy fantasy on J. S. Bach's music, with inspiration from Lou Reed's classic Metal Machine Music and a video graphic score reminiscent of early experimental film by Hans Richter. Morris uses sound to visually distort the manuscript of Bach's famous Cello Suite, yielding a new musical score to read. This audiovisual reimagining is native to our time while gleaning some underlying musical intuition from the flow of Bach's music. Eric KM Clark (Southland Ensemble, California E.A.R. Unit) performs a tryptich of improvised works in different interactive environments a virtual string quintet, a tangled strand of echoes, and a microscopic journey inside the materials that make up the violin itself. Morris controls these musical constructs live, which are inspired by a house of mirrors and Einstein's daydream of riding beside a beam of light. Using control interfaces like a gamepad and Nintendo Wii Remotes (Wiimotes), Morris takes a variety of roles in the music, ranging from a performer alongside Clark to a digital conductor of his own software orchestra. This is not your ordinary laid-back InchstringsInch music. Rather, it is a vibrant journey through the possibilities of digital-native chamber music that is sure to light up your imagination.

2LP • In 1979, Spring Records released the first hip-hop style rap record 'King Tim III (Personality Jock)' by The Fatback Band. The tag, initially relegated it to the B-Side, allowed the Sugarhill Gang the breakthrough rap hit with 'Rapper's Delight'. Over the next decade, Spring kept dipping their toes in the water, but without any great conviction or mainstream success but were always there to chart hip-hop's development. InchDollar Bill Y'AllInch focuses on all the key moments and includes personality jocks like Mr. Magic, street tough rapping, live funk bands and the birth of sampling. This compilation is a detailed compilation looking at Spring Records' - and sub-tag Posse - long and sometimes troubled relationship with hip-hop's first decade. InchDollar Bill Y'AllInch shows that, despite their reservations, Spring recorded landmark records by not just King Tim III, but Jimmy Spicer, DJ Hollywood and Ice T (as part of Afrika & The Zulu Kings). Extended sleeve notes, penned by Dean Rudland, tells the story of how the tag could have been a force in the next generation of rap, possibly even signing Gang Starr, if only they had been committed the Bally Boys single, which now sells for hundreds of pounds, was produced by Donald Dee Bowden who produced Gang Starr's debut single 'The Lesson'.

Jeff Morris presents his fourth Ravello Records , this one focusing on woodwinds and employing his characteristic live sampling and electronics. CLOSE REEDING is the latest since HEARING VOICES, an album which set it's sights on the most fundamentally-human musical instrument the human voice. Now, Morris turns his attention to woodwind instruments, which he terms the Inchnext most humanInch family of instruments. By way of digital manipulation and live improvisation, Morris gives this thesis a convincing exposition. One might think of the InchhumannessInch of a saxophone as being diametrically opposed to the cold, binary logic of a computer. As Morris sees it, the electronic interface that Morris controls is extremely sensitive to the input it receives, outlining it's operator's humanity in a sort of digital Inchcounter-relief.Inch CLOSE REEDING is an unchoreographed dance between Morris and the instrumentalist. Pulsating with the thrill of live performance, the musicians react to each other, and somehow, the machine seems to add it's own artistic choices to the composition as well. While most of the tracks feature a single woodwind instrumentalist going head to head with Morris, What's in a Whisper, a 4-movement piece, includes not only an alto saxophone but also a drum set and synthesizers. By isolating split-second musical moments, Morris draws out each instrument's range of timbral complexity with microscopic clarity-giving serious credence to the title CLOSE REEDING.