The Patient Sound World of Loscil

Since 2001, Loscil, AKA Scott Morgan, has been quietly releasing a steady stream of high-quality electronic music from his perch in the Pacific Northwest. The project actually crystalized in the late ’90s, when Morgan broke away from his work as a drummer and guitarist in Vancouver’s indie rock scene and instead focused on the creation of stark, evocative electronic landscapes.

His initial solo outing, the self-released A New Demonstration of Thermodynamic Tendencies, caught the attention of experimental outpost Kranky, which included many of that record’s songs on the first official Loscil LP, Triple Point. Since then, the label has been something of a consistent home for Morgan, issuing six additional albums, including the submarine-themed Submers, the more organic Plume and 2014’s Sea Island.

Aside from his own releases – which have also appeared on labels like Ghostly International and his own Frond imprint – Morgan has contributed music to numerous films, documentaries and video games. Throughout it all, his techniques and approach have evolved, but the striking emotional impact of his work remains intact. In this excerpt from an interview with RBMA Radio, Morgan talks about his career thus far.

Early Days

I grew up in a really small town on Vancouver Island called Courtenay. Music very early on, probably in my early teens, became a go-to for an escape from all that is small town life. When I graduated from high school I went to Vancouver to go to music school. There was a big electronic program. It was a eureka moment for me. Computer music and electro-acoustic music and the idea that you could make a whole palette of sounds with a collection of devices in the studio – that it didn’t all have to be using conventional instruments.

I always had a dichotomy between being a guitar player and a drummer and playing in rock bands combined with this really academic and predominantly electronic music world. Those two worlds colliding were the petri dish for Loscil, in a way. I would take ideas from school in terms of sound design or recording practices and apply those to the stuff we were doing in bands at the time. I was really into nerdy math rock in the early bands I was playing in. It was also around the same time that Gastr Del Sol was making music. I was really interested in the way they were interweaving guitar and piano. Jim O’Rourke would do some 20 minute drum thing at the end of a song. I really loved that interplay.

Around the time I finished school, a good friend was running a little experimental movie theater called the Blinding Light. A group of friends and myself ended up curating a night every month there called The Multiplex, which was a very early exploration into video accompanied with music. That was basically the birthplace of Loscil as a project.

The stuff we were doing at The Multiplex was really about me recognizing in my circle of friends that people were doing interesting things in their bedrooms or basements with four tracks and with all kinds of weird electronics. Even just stringing a guitar in some weird way, like tuning every string to the same note and hitting it with a stick. There were people naturally experimenting who weren’t academic people. These were just friends that I played with in bands.

Early Recordings

We did the Multiplex shows for a couple years and somewhere near the end I started to gravitate towards that sound that became the handful of pieces on that first demo that I made as Loscil, A New Demonstration of Thermodynamic Tendencies. I just handmade a bunch of CDs and started sending them out as demos to labels. Kranky was one of them. That started a conversation and a relationship with Joel at Kranky that’s lasted a really long time. It’s a business relationship, but it’s also a friendship. It’s a nice thing.

The initial reason for sending Kranky a demo was a Labradford record that was among the label’s first releases. It was post-rock, really arty rock music, stripped down, super minimal and very atmospheric. That was something I was very interested in, even though I was making an electronic equivalent of that. It felt like it might be a good fit.

The idea for The New Demonstration of Thermodynamic Tendencies came from this science book on thermodynamics that had charts and data. I just loved the language of it, and the idea that music could be presented almost as a scientific document. There’s no science involved in the creation of the music or anything like that. Without scientists even knowing it, I think they can be surprisingly poetic and beautiful. It’s stark in some way. It’s very particular and numerical, and seemingly doesn’t have any kind of emotional weight to it. But – and I find this with a lot of things – you can put emotional weight on it just by re-contextualizing it. This idea of heat and energy exchanging and constantly shifting and moving – even just the data representation of that, not just the idea of it – was a very poetic and beautiful thing.

Submers / First Narrows

Submers is when I first started really using Max/MSP software and was building my own software, whereas Triple Point was all samplers and synthesizers and assembled in a more conventional way (and wasn’t produced that well in my opinion). With Submers I really found my comfort zone in terms of how I was treating and layering sounds.

The submarine thing? I don’t even know where it came from. I tend to get really obsessive around ridiculous things sometimes. I think it may have started with Kursk, which was the Russian nuclear sub that was trapped underwater. I just thought the horrific idea of being helpless and trapped underwater is powerful. Water in general is just so... It can be so powerful and deadly, and I guess there’s a part of me that really respects that.

It seems so cheesy, looking back on it, making a record about submarines, but it’s not really about submarines. It’s about that feeling of the weightlessness and the power and the danger of being underwater. But also the womb-like security of it too.

The next record, First Narrows, felt like a step back towards my life playing with people in bands. There were a lot of friends on that record like Tim Loewen, the guitar player. When you look at those two records, the really isolated, strictly electronic sound of Submers and then the lighter, more improvisational feel of First Narrows, those are my two different styles that have always come and gone from my records.

Sea Island / Sea Island Murders

“Sea Island Murders,” from Sea Island, is a really simple idea. I created a series of phrases that don’t have any rhythms. They’re just sequences of notes. It’s almost like a seven tone row idea. I just used the computer to randomly spit out different combinations of these seven notes and printed out this sheet of it for Kelly, the piano player. That’s the music side of it.

The other side of it is the title. Sea Island is where the airport is in Vancouver. The Fraser River comes out and creates this big delta. It’s strange. There are parks around it. Iona Beach is one of the parks – the cover of the record is taken from that spot.

It was the same with [2012’s] Sketches from New Brighton. I’m really attracted to these places that mix nature and industry. Again, it’s nice and ugly slamming together somehow. Sea Island really captured a lot of that for me. At the end of the runway there’s a bunch of old houses that were built for housing for Boeing plant workers. The area, during the second World War, was a manufacturing plant for planes. I was reading a lot of crime fiction around then, and it just looked like the kind of place someone would get murdered. I don’t know. I was imagining this story and placing it there and almost writing a soundtrack to that. Part of me doesn’t want to say all of this. The nuts and bolts of it are actually not really as interesting as the mystery.

like things that are pretty and beautiful, but tarnished in some way. I never really want to make something that is pure ear candy. It’s got to be a little bit difficult somehow. Just a little bit. I’m not super avant-garde or anything. In creating stuff, I just want to see where the boundaries are for myself, instead of just making something that’s purely zone-out music.

Film Work

I’ve done a number of things as a sound designer, and a whole professional history working in video games and film. But as Loscil, which I consider my baby, I find it a lot tougher to apply it to films that are not mine.

The last experience I had was really good because the director, after talking about it, realized that he would get better results if he just gave me some freedom and didn’t try too hard to tell me exactly what to do. Like, “You’ve got to hit this moment here.” Those old school sessions of sitting with the film and going, “We need this emotion here”... I would fail at that so miserably.

But given freedom to work the way I normally work with the idea of the film in mind, and then giving that material to an editor to pick and choose where it fits in the film, it was much better for me than if I were to have to moment-by-moment score a film.

This process I’ve arrived at with Loscil stuff is very intuitive and very reactionary and very accidental and very … It’s not very … I don’t sit down and construct a record, I just work on stuff until the record forms itself. Doing soundtrack work I need that freedom to work the way I work and hope things work out and line up. I could shift my headspace and not do it as Loscil and do very conventional stuff. But then what would be the point?