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Scott Morgan
THE STORY OF THE GREAT COMPOSER
Vancouver-based producer behind the music of Loscil. Under this moniker his music is often found filed under 'ambient', but in reality it has more of a foreground impact through its deep and meaningful content.
His work as loscil—the name inspired by a function in computer music language Csound ("Looping oscillator was what it stood for, and I thought, well, that pretty much sums up what electronic music is!")—began in the late '90s, shortly after he graduated from Simon Fraser University. Morgan co-formed a multimedia collective, the Multiplex Grand, which curated regular experimental audio-visual events at an underground Gastown cinema, the Blinding Light.
He enjoys working mostly with samples, preferring recorded sounds to synthesized sounds
He enjoys working mostly with samples, preferring recorded sounds to synthesized sounds
The West Coast, particularly the mountains and ocean, is a recurring theme in his work.
"It's an inevitable part of me, and it always seems to come back in my practice somehow. I've always felt that instrumental music—and, certainly, music that slows down tempo and takes you out of the very fast-paced world that we're in—can be a kind of gift to people to offer that space. And for me, as a creator, too, it is a space to go and disappear into.
Through sound ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp—a professor at SFU's School
of Communications—Morgan was introduced to the idea of soundscape ecology and listening to sounds in a natural environment. It redefined his understanding of what music is, what its role can be, and how it connects to our physiology, as well
as the natural world around us.
of Communications—Morgan was introduced to the idea of soundscape ecology and listening to sounds in a natural environment. It redefined his understanding of what music is, what its role can be, and how it connects to our physiology, as well
as the natural world around us.
Contemporary Arts, where he began studying under Barry Truax, a pioneer of granular synthesis, which layers samples at different speeds, volumes, and frequencies. Truax made
a profound and enduring impact on Morgan.
a profound and enduring impact on Morgan.
Barry was huge for me in my life. I learned so much from him. [Granular synthesis] is still used quite often in electronic music today and I'm using it in my set [at Sound Space]. 4DSOUND has granular synthesis built in. His legacy is everywhere. I can't really underscore it enough."
Finding itself nestled halfway between the endlessly spacious mechanoid constructions of Berlin's Basic Channel and the drifting expanses of Labradford, Scott Morgan's work as Loscil never ceases to impress me with its deft use of technology and percussion to take the Kranky blueprint into slightly different pastures. Beautiful music from a label that rarely deals in anything but.
All of the tracks are named after submarines, the final cut being a requiem for the crew of the ill fated Russian nuclear vessel Kursk. Recorded at home on computer with samples and keyboards used as sound sources, Submers is rife with source-less echoes, steely surfaces and ominous melodic and rhythmic undertows.
The sifted melodies are layered over muffled, clicking and pulsing rhythm tracks with an appropriately aquatic feel to the entire album. After the release of loscil's debut, Triple Point, Morgan toured Europe in early 2002 and released an EP on UK's Involve label. Submers is an album that easily merges ambient , contemporary classical music and minimal techno in defiance of the current mania for micro-genres.
The sifted melodies are layered over muffled, clicking and pulsing rhythm tracks with an appropriately aquatic feel to the entire album. After the release of loscil's debut, Triple Point, Morgan toured Europe in early 2002 and released an EP on UK's Involve label. Submers is an album that easily merges ambient , contemporary classical music and minimal techno in defiance of the current mania for micro-genres.
"I've always felt that instrumental music—and, certainly, music that slows down tempo and takes you out of the very fast-paced world that we're in—can be a kind of gift to people to offer that space. And for me, as a creator, too, it is a space to go and disappear into."
2001
Kranky
Kranky
2002
The echoing, glitchy and soft percussion is still present as ever, but xylophone and vibraphone sounds make up the album's backbone, trapped amongst curls of static and deep, subtle synthwork. Plume' is deeper than any of Morgan's previous efforts and opens itself to you very slowly - the more time you allow it, the more enjoyment you will mine from it's rich cavernous depths.
'Steam' build up gradually out of very little, cyclic percussion rolling around deep underneath the dense chords and thick basslines, it's impossible not to let this music transport you into a world much sparser than our own. Look out of the window and into the sky and as you concentrate your eyes start to blur slightly - this is the world of Loscil.
'Steam' build up gradually out of very little, cyclic percussion rolling around deep underneath the dense chords and thick basslines, it's impossible not to let this music transport you into a world much sparser than our own. Look out of the window and into the sky and as you concentrate your eyes start to blur slightly - this is the world of Loscil.
Kranky
2006
"Using sound sources that ranged from sampled instruments to miscellaneous lo-fi mini-cassette recordings, Morgan generated music on computer by custom programming sequencing and processing designed so that no two performances of the patches would be exactly the same. In turn, Jason Zumpano on fender rhodes piano, Tim Loewen on guitar and Nyla Rany on cello improvised over those electronic sequences. Morgan then edited and mixed the live and premixed sections together.
First Narrows is named after the first gap to the entrance of the Burrard Inlet, over which the Lions Gate Bridge spans; the main entrance into Vancouver from the Pacific Ocean. By including a loscil track on their compilation of Canadian electronica alongside artists like Tim Hecker, Polmo Polpo, Ghislain Poirier and Thomas Jirku, the intr_version label confirmed that Loscil deserves placement among the unique practitioners of electronic sound arrangement."
First Narrows is named after the first gap to the entrance of the Burrard Inlet, over which the Lions Gate Bridge spans; the main entrance into Vancouver from the Pacific Ocean. By including a loscil track on their compilation of Canadian electronica alongside artists like Tim Hecker, Polmo Polpo, Ghislain Poirier and Thomas Jirku, the intr_version label confirmed that Loscil deserves placement among the unique practitioners of electronic sound arrangement."
Morgan released Stases, a collection of drones based upon the backgrounds of his work for Kranky. The album was made available as a free download-only release from One Records.
one
Kranky
2004
2005
"I think it really highlights the immersive quality of the audio. It's quite different than two stereo speakers pointing at you from a stage, where the sound is very one-directional. I mean, we're so used to that and that's how most venues are set up. But I think this creates an environment which is more in tune with a kind of internalized listening, such as headphone listening."
" Equivalents - A series of photographs of clouds by the photographer Alfred Steiglitz beginning in 1925 Who's intent was meant to detach the actual image from the subject. In this case the subject was something other than the clouds. In music all are equivalents as music is truly abstract by its very nature, so what you conger up is yours and yours only.
"Equivalents" finds Loscil exploring a variety of sonic terrains, vast open spaces as defined by haunting and mesmerizing electronic tones.
"Equivalents" finds Loscil exploring a variety of sonic terrains, vast open spaces as defined by haunting and mesmerizing electronic tones.
Kranky
2011
'Strathcona' is a brilliant return for Morgan, charting a micro-melodic, minimalist structure that brings to mind works like Taylor Deupree's Stil. or the more recent works from Biosphere. Using just two chords, Morgan stirs up a glorious sound world that builds up to orchestral proportions, filtering its way through deceptively simple passages that lead towards a 'Union Dusk' - a sequel of sorts that takes the same essential ingredients, adding xylophone melodies and a more rigid sense of rhythm before 'Midnight On Princess' dismantles the momentum, opting for a more mysterious and altogether cinematic drone-based soundscape. Good stuff, this.
Ghostly International
2009
'Estuarine's minimal and plaintive piano phrases wouldn't be nearly so alluring were they not partially hidden away from you, and the stretched-out violins of the title track only function as beautifully as they do because they're cradled by a low, warm hum of filtered out, ambient sound matter. Rather than merely revelling in protracted linear drone exercises, Morgan latches his music to subtle rhythmic elements throughout the album, most prominently highlighted by 'Dub For Cascadia' - whose melancholy chord surges, crackling waves of static and contoured bass throbs sound like Stars Of The Lid playing along to something from the first three Pole albums. It's difficult to contemplate such a thing, but Endless Falls might be that rarest of things: an album whose best track is a spoken-word piece. In this case Destroyer's Daniel Bejar takes to the mic for the nine-minute closing piece. 'The Making Of Grief Point' is nine minutes of dramatically-charged, glitching, Biosphere-like drone, spun from downplayed neo-classical instrumentation and filtered loops, all accompanying Bejar's typically elliptical, digression-prone and fractured lyrics.
Morgan released Stases, a collection of drones based upon the backgrounds of his work for Kranky. The album was made available as a free download-only release from One Records.
"I find that organic sounds have a kind of richness about them and you can shape them in so many different ways."
Loscil Self-released
Kranky
2010
2011
Seventh album of amorphous ambient drift as Loscil. 'Sketches From New Brighton' is an impressionistic collection inspired by his time spent watching the ships drift by from an ocean side park in Vancouver. It unfolds as gracefully as that imagery evokes; massive abstract shapes serenely, quietly cut across rippling rhythmic patterns, distant fog horn like sonorities ricocheting across the bay with the noirish, North Western elegance of a Badalamenti theme for a Twin Peaks.
Kranky
2012
The album perhaps betrays a return influence from his day job as a sound director for the video game industry, as Monument Builders could soundtrack a bleak first person immersion in some dark parallel world not too dissimilar to our own, patiently plotting a course thru the resonant, widescreen space and cracked ice patterns of Drained Lake to ascend a vertiginous vortex of throbbing synths - among the most kinetic piece in his whole catalogue - in the anxiously melancholy Red Tide, pausing for murky reflection in the title track, and raising the tension again with the frosty brassy swells of Straw Dogs and coolly baffling the senses with the headlong techno velocity and strangely static poise of Anthropocene, leaving with us the OOBE, swarmed by deliquescent, dying angels in Weeds.
Kranky
2016
Interview with Exberliner, Loscil described a facet of his 2014 album thus: "Vancouver is the ideal setting, and I say that in a sort of ironic way. The nature is so beautiful but it's coupled with human intervention. [My 2014 album] Sea Island is really inspired by that contrast. That area being a nature reserve as well as an industrial area and an airport is both beautiful and kind of horrific. I relish that contrast. There's a balance there that I find interesting from a musical perspective. It opens the door to interpretation."
Kranky
2014
2009 Strathcona variations ep
(GHOSTLY INTERNATIONAL)
(ONE)
2005 Stases
(BANDCAMP)
2010 Versions ep
2012 City hospital
(WIST REC)
2013 Intervalo
(FROND)
2014 Fury and hecla
(GIZEH RECORDS)
2015 Adrift
(FROND)
2016 Suns
(FROND)
2016 The air at night
(MOSSGROVE MUSIC)
2016 Lodge
(1631 RECORDINGS)
(INVOLVE RECORDS)
2001 Involve Ep02
EPs and other releases
2004 ScaredSacred
(DOCUMENTARY FILM SOUNDTRACK)
2003 Saturday Morning Empires
(Intr Version)
2006 Idol Tryouts: Ghostly International Vol. 2
(Ghostly International)
2009 Osmos
(computer game)
2013 Hundreds
(iOS game)
(Film)
2014 Divergent
2017 Suburra: Blood on Rome
(Netflix)
2019 Lifelike
(IOS GAME)
2003 The Corporation
2008 The Sleep Machine
(documentary film soundtrack)
(Chequerboards online)
Tracks featured on
violet
Vespera
lux
Cobalt
Violet from the album Colours of Air by loscil // Lawrence English - kranky 2023
from the album 'Clara' by loscil out on kranky
Picture by aAron Munson
"LUX" by Loscil - from the album CLARA
"LUX" by Loscil - from the album CLARA
Produced with support from The Dance Centre, the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.
EU/UK 2023
2023-02-20
2023-02-23
2023-02-27
2023-02-21
2023-02-25
2023-02-28
Auditorium Fondazione Cariplo
Sala Apolo
Nowy Świat Muzyki
Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra
Royal Albert Hall
Cultural Center of Novi Sad
Largo Gustav Mahler, Milano MI, Italy
Carrer Nou de la Rambla, 113, Barcelona, Spain
Nowy Świat 63, 00-042 Warszawa, Poland
Mannerheimintie 13, Helsinki, Finland
Kensington Gore, South Kensington, London, GB
Catholic Port 5, Novi Sad 21101, Serbia
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info@loscil.ca
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