- Genres: Avant-Garde
- Representative Albums: "Formative Causation", "In Streams, Vol. 1: 1996-1999
Biography
Morphogenesis is one of the few improvisational groups still active who traces their lineage not to jazz improvisation, but to the live electronic music of John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, AMM, and Musica Electronica Viva (M.E.V.). They eschew virtuosic displays of instrumental prowess, preferring a collective texture and group dialogue in a context of continual formal evolution and integration of the most diverse elements. Seldom does one even hear a recognizable instrument, as the group not only prepares the instruments such as piano and violin, but each group member performs his own electronic processing, and there is often a member whose sole responsibility is signal processing for the group's output as a whole. In addition, group members have created their own instruments, such as Michael Prime, who plays a water machine and biofeedback from plants, or Clive Graham, who plays electrified springs. The group has also placed microphones around the audience as well as outside the performing space altogether, incorporating the sounds of traffic into the mix. Although they performed scores by Cage and Stockhausen in their early years, all of their recorded work is improvised, and later, the group began to only perform improvisations.The group's foundations go back to 1984, when Roger Sutherland taught a class entitled New Music: Webern and After, at City University in London. He had a small but dedicated group who took the class a second time, then decided to meet separately to listen to everything in Roger's extensive collection. From there it was a small step to playing for themselves, and the group Morphogenesis was born. They started with Cage and Stockhausen scores, but quickly evolved into an improvisational framework. Invited to play at an electro-acoustic festival in 1985, they intended to play set pieces by Cage and Christian Wolff, but found they had to improvise to fill the time. They later met on a weekly basis to play open-ended improvisations, which they recorded and evaluated. Some of the group members, including Prime and Adam Bohman, are involved in other solo and group projects, and have recorded with Nurse With Wound, Organum, and Jim O'Rourke. Sutherland had been part of Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra. In addition to the group activities, Clive Graham also runs the Paradigm label, which has released not only Morphogenesis albums, but a series of experimental music compilations from London and other lost electro-acoustic classics. ~ Caleb Deupree, All Music Guide
