Amorphae is the first album guitarist Ben Monder recorded as a leader for ECM, and his sixth as a leader overall. It was conceived as a series of duets with drummer Paul Motian, in whose band Monder had first appeared on the label with Garden of Eden. After Motian's death in 2011 the project was completed with Andrew Cyrille and, on two pieces, Pete Rende on synthesizer. The result is a mostly improvised, dreamlike record, far more ambient than Monder's usual work.
The album draws on two sessions. In October 2010 Monder and Motian recorded Oh, What a Beautiful Morning and Triffids at Sear Sound in Manhattan, where the solo Dinosaur Skies was also taped, with James Farber engineering. In December 2013, at Brooklyn Recording with Rick Kwan, he cut the solo Tendrils, two duets with Cyrille and two trio pieces with Cyrille and Rende. Sun Chung produced. Monder knew Cyrille, who made his name with Cecil Taylor in the 1960s, from a band led by saxophonist Bill McHenry that played at Motian's memorial concert.
On most tracks Monder plays the Ibanez AS-50 he has used since the early 1980s. A vintage Lexicon reverb, set to maximum decay, gives what he calls "extreme sustain". Oh, What a Beautiful Morning, the Rodgers & Hammerstein song he had earlier played in Motian's Electric Bebop Band, becomes a slow, reharmonised abstraction carried by Motian's brushes. On Hematophagy, a duet with Cyrille, Monder derives his voicings from Olivier Messiaen's sixth mode, and the piece is sharp and intervallically aggressive. Zythum, named after an ancient beer-like drink, has a woozy, sustained sound that Rende's synthesizers widen. Monder plays a baritone guitar on record for the first time on Tumid Cenobite, and a Fender Bass VI on Gamma Crucis.
Reviewers heard the album as a departure. Anthony Dean-Harris of Nextbop called it "contemplative, expansive, tumultuously beautiful and beautifully tumultuous", while warning that its drone character would not suit everyone. At ECM Reviews, Tyran Grillo noted that the two solo pieces open and close the album, and described Dinosaur Skies as "a dragon's breath turned into music".
This is the CD edition, ECM 2421, first released in 2015.
