Morgan’s Organ at Home #23 Strobo-Bodies
Morgan’s Salon
July 26, 2015
Morgan Fisher—keyboards, visuals
Most music venues keep the audience and musicians at a distance in one way or another, so to sink into a chair to hear Morgan Fisher in his salon, studio and performance space is to be in a different musical and experiential space altogether. Morgan (certain musicians just fit their first names better) has played with an eclectic and impressive list of musicians all over the world during his career, but these days, he’s into creating engaging, broadly encompassing performances where improvised music, eye-popping visuals and a warmth of experience merge into something special.
Every month, Morgan performs solo or together with an artistic collaborator. Morgan is a master keyboard player. He plays digital keyboards as if they were analog, and analog instruments as if they were juiced. The thrum of loops and pulsing of riffs gets laid down as he likes from the get-go and then he just takes off in marvelous directions. And he takes everyone in the room (seats are limited) along for the journey. More than a musician, he is a choreographer of the senses, putting videos together with his music in ways that are deeply affecting.
For the Strobo-Bodies show in July, Morgan played two hour-long improvisations that were alluringly hypnotic and gorgeously textured. He moved around his instrumental circle from keyboard to keyboard, having chosen from his extensive collection of vintage and rare keyboards. He also took the occasional stop at a duck squeeze toy or an odd percussive something-or-rather at just the right moment. The stops are never stops, though, as Morgan segues from one melodic and rhythmic exploration to the next. The musical textures streamed into soundscapes big enough to lay back and get lost inside, but nuanced and intricate enough to keep you leaning forward.
The music was accompanied by visuals projected on a screen above his keyboard circle. Morgan created a fluid, softly rotating slide show from his own photos and intriguing videos that he set going. One couldn’t call it “accompaniment” exactly, as if he was setting postmodern piano playing to some abstract silent movie. The collaboration of media was a taut interplay between sight and sound that moved from counterpoint to synchronization to confluence and back again.
Strobo-Bodies refers to a stroboscopic photographic technique that goes back to the very beginnings of photography. Tapping into his other specialty, light-manipulating photography, Morgan used strobe lights to capture the flow of bodily motion, a swinging arm or dancing torso, to reveal the inner armatures of the human body. It’s mesmerizing to watch the stopped images while the music flows on ceaselessly, as the arrested images and ongoing melodies create tensions that rise and fall and then merge into one.
The question of how to separate the dancer from the dance becomes a moot point, as the sonics and visuals fit together so intriguingly. “Combines” was the word Robert Rauschenberg used to describe his bringing together of the everyday world and the art world, of the methods of sculpture with the techniques of painting, and Morgan’s method of combining keyboard improvising with the stroboscopic photography and videos of dancing similarly obscures the boundaries between two sensory spheres. Of course, that blurring is really a clarifying, not to mention a sensory delight.
Morgan’s home salon performances leave one with the feeling of being able to see and hear more fully and emotionally. Exactly the opposite of a concert video where the video shows a close-up of the musician’s face because we can’t see from the cheap seats far away, Morgan’s salon is intimate. Because we get to see him create up close, the photos and videos carry us in other directions, launching the listening/watching mind into fresh, new spaces. It is an engaging, meditative experience quite unlike any other, and simply not to be missed.
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August 26, 2015