Morphogenesis

condition (record/cover): NM / VG+ (light general wear)

Morphogenesis was the long-running British electroacoustic improvisation collective formed in London in 1985 by Adam Bohman, Clive Graham, Roger Sutherland, and Ron Briefel, later expanded to include Michael Prime. The group's method was unusually systematic: acoustic and amplified found objects, home-built electronics, shortwave radio, and biofeedback-derived signals, processed through what the group called "non-idiomatic" improvisation derived from Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra lineage on one side and the British free-improvisation tradition (Derek Bailey, AMM) on the other.

Released on the American Pogus Productions imprint (Al Margolis's long-running experimental label out of New York), Prochronisms extends the group's investigation into what the title term calls "things out of time": anachronistic acoustic textures, tape-reel anomalies, found signals appearing where they have no right to be. The sonic vocabulary overlaps with what the Hafler Trio, Organum, and late-period Nurse With Wound had been doing in adjacent British corners, but Morphogenesis's improvisation-based method gives the record a looser, more organic quality.

Michael Prime's extensive work with plants and biological systems as sound sources (recording the electrical fluctuations of lettuces, mushrooms, and other organic matter) became a major thread of the group's later output, and is already audible here in the album's mid-range textural beds. A key document of British electroacoustic improvisation from the mid-Nineties, and one of the records that defined the particular dialect for which "post-AMM" is the closest available shorthand.