Morgan is an organizer and experimental electronic musician who draws creative strength from the vast diasporas of his fellow southeast Asian kin.
Previously, Morgan co-curated Soy&synth, an experimental concert series with Indonesian collective Soydivision, co-releasing much of the output on their sister label L-KW alongside MidnightShift.
Morgan is also initiator of Latent Sonorities, a project with the House of Indonesian Cultures – Rumah Budaya Indonesia – Berlin (RBI) and Morphine Records Raum developing an open source sample pack and tuning files of Javanese gamelan instruments from RBI’s instrument collection. Its public release was accompanied by a concert series, DAW tools, album and guide for other artists and researchers working with sonic archives.
“Having grown up between Hawaii, Borneo and Southern California, I always felt ‘between’, a milieu of cultural and musical diffusion. Sundanese gamelan (with it’s arguably most famous song, ‘Sabilulungan’), the Beach Boys, pop melayu and eventually punk, industrial, noise before utterly relinquishing to the music of illegal raves of Southern California in the 90’s.
After being smuggled from Borneo to live in an unfinished plantation owner’s house in Hawaii, Morgan continued experiencing the dual-sonic realities of traditional Sundanese gamelan music, Malaysian pop with 'Western' songs from blues, pop, folk and other Americana. As English was the main language spoken wherever home was, many of the lyrics (and language) from Indonesian songs were lost in my family’s journey Eastward across (what is now) the United States towards Europe.
Picking up the sound cultures of techno, dub, punk and other club musics along the way, much of Morgan’s debut album Echoes released on Chinabot, is an attempt at recollecting a hybrid sonic language, an unattainable and elusive ‘home’.
