In Streams Vol. 1
(Paradigm Discs - PD16) CD $13.50
Everything here by this legendary UK free sound conglomerate, working together for well over a decade without ever using laptops or samplers is performed and processed completely live, using varispeed CD player, prerecorded analog tape (manually inched past the playback head), amplified objects, piano, biofeedback, water machine, percussion. Volume one collects performances from the late '90s - two recorded live in London, one in Cologne, and the studio track "Charivari Remnant." Start here unless you've already been frozen in the center of an ice block and thawed by ten-thousand heated centipedes. Otherwise, you'll miss the shrieks of agitated head-footed mollusks transmitted by hacked long-distance telecommunications motherboards. After Morphogenesis have rustled the gag jewelry on your lumbar vertebrae, an elusive ringing does wheelies throughout the central nervous system, with no guarantee that paralysis will assist in reorientation. TEDIUM HOUSE BEST OF 2001.
In Streams Vol. 2
(Paradigm Discs - PD17) CD $13.50
Volume two collects four more performances recorded between mid 1997 and mid 2000, when no one surpassed the sextet at draping sprawling, waterlogged tapetum over spiney shoulders of lymph-challengers waving a black flag. Gong-pepper shavings drift down from the sky like fish food in an aquarium, settling on boulevards slick with alien phlegm, and causing a complex chemical reaction that yields light blue denatured pus resembling sapphire pie crust. A map wouldn't even help navigate the plumbing anomalies here, the mess hall assemblies, the monorail prototype demonstrations (pre-kink removal), the arboreal growth spurts, the ultraviolet snowplows, the speculum-induced, big-cat belches, or the freefalls through three-dimensional matrices of snorts, snuffles, blurts and scrapes (with optional rebounds through pinball machines). With human error as the cornerstone of civilization, it's amazing that in a group the size of Morphogenesis, no one fucks it up with bad judgement or prolonged lapses of indulgence. In Streams reveals just a few facets in an ongoing montage that doesn't act like a montage because of the collective discipline of Adam Bohman, Ron Briefel, Clive Graham, Clive Hall, Michael Prime and Roger Sutherland, who improvise with a high degree of coordination on enough home-made and hot-wired gear to fill several wholesale outlets. They selectively deploy prepared instruments, signal processing, purely electronic sources, and non-musical objects; meningiomata, papillomaviruses, and liquidy protrusions you could look up in Diseases Of The Skin get raked across bongo drum terrain, and digital goink meows vault over the corpse of Count Amadeo Avogadro's body as if part of a score derived from migratory lesions of burrowing nematodes and larvae, and it could go on forever, easily. Unless it doesn't. TEDIUM HOUSE BEST OF 2001