Interview: Morphosis on Charles Cohen, Lebanon and Ritual

Morphosis has clearly marked himself out as one of the most distinctive electronic music producers of the past decade, bringing a unique view to house and techno that is informed as much by avant-garde jazz as it is noise. His improvisational approach to house was most widely heard on his breakout 2011 album What Have We Learned for the Delsin label, but you can hear his further movements on his own Morphine imprint, a label that also recently brought to light the Buchla work of Charles Cohen. We caught up with the Lebanese-born producer recently in Berlin to talk about his upbringing, why Cohen’s work made such an impact on him and much more.

Have you seen any movies recently that have inspired you?

I saw this movie by Toshio Matsumotu called For the Damaged Right Eye, screened and retaken from three projectors. There was one in the center and two on the sides, mixing up images and information continuously. Basically it was an anti-conformist work against the injection or attack of Western countries and civilizations forced into the Japanese culture. So it was focusing on how the Japanese were actually receiving all this information.

Especially post-War.

Exactly. Those were the years. But also even later, during the Cultural Revolution in Japan in the mid-’70s. Until the mid-’70s the Japanese were quite conformist. They were really close-minded. And at some point they started opening up because of all this information coming in from outside. So there was this social revolution in Japan that was then smashed by the government.

Basically since the late ’70s, the Japanese people generally were put in a condition to never say protests against the government. And that was the case even regarding Fukushima for two years. When I went to Japan the last time, in November, there was a really clear, sudden change in there, They were saying that it was the first time in more than 20 years that somebody is starting to stand up and publicly respond to the government.

Have you ever read Julian Cope’s Japrocksampler?

I haven’t read it, but I would love to because all these things are a bit of a reflection of Western societies applied elsewhere. Japan is quite an interesting field in the way how you see the results of this influence on the product itself.

It’s so closed off in some ways and completely ahead in other ways.

Exactly. My own impression is that it’s very simple. For them, you cannot mix the two things. You take what comes from outside, but you cannot make it part of your tradition. You have to use it but still recognize it as something from the outside.

Speaking of tradition, I wanted to talk about your upbringing. Did you grow up in Beirut?

Close by. In a city on the coast in the north.

What was it like growing up there?

I was growing up during the civil war, so you constantly had this as a state of being. You had to find a balance at some point. Everybody would go to work and live normally, except there would be bombing days in certain areas. There were boundaries between this area and this area and this area.

A situation! They way I’ve always heard it, is there was electronic music in Beirut earlier than in other places in the Middle East.

There were often things happening. There was stuff going on because there was a wider cultural exchange between Western countries and Lebanon. Also because of emigrants. Many people were leaving the country. Even during the war, in Lebanon there were people listening to the radio from France or Italy. So in this sense there was a constant contact with Europe. But on the other hand, the actual arrival of regular music products was not that continuous.

Was there a gathering point? Was there a record store or a club or something?

I started becoming more active on this side when the war started to stop, in a way. That’s when you could start going around and buying records and discovering the shops and making contact with people. There were several points, and one of them was in West Beirut. Until 1992, I never went there. It was still a bit of an ad hoc zone for the people from Eastern area.

It was a East-West thing?

Yeah. It was. And so what happened is by opening these boundaries we got in touch with the rest of the culture in Lebanon. For me, there was stuff that I never knew. Only because I was closed in a different area. Not only music-wise, also culture-wise.

Was there one record that somehow blew the doors open for you?

“French Kiss.” It was banned by our family. I couldn’t listen to this song in front of my dad. This created a little buzz around it, and – in a way – it introduced me to Lil Louis. It was impossible to find any of his records in Lebanon. I get into everything in a very random way. I just collect things and try to find a place for them. I’m not a record collector, though.

Why is that?

Some years ago I started being convinced that a record was only a material object. A record is a material thing. The music and culture that stands behind it is the essence. But if this record is a repress or an original copy, it’s just material. So before you know that record and you listen to it and you use it and you hear it, you’re just collecting art or pieces or cards. I have no problem with buying a repress, for example. I know some collectors in Italy, and they do it properly. They buy records and after some years they say, “Okay, now is the time to sell.” And they sell it for ten times more than the work. But that’s when you are emotionally detached from the records. You have to be either a collector or a music lover. You can be both, of course. But there should be…

…a balance. You’re a very idiosyncratic DJ, so I’m curious to hear who you like to listen to play records.

Theo Parrish. He is definitely one of the most talented DJs I’ve ever heard. I know that technically he’s not impeccable, but the stuff he plays isn’t easy to play. But to be honest, sometimes it goes beyond the technique. Traxx is another. It’s not only about the genres of the music they play. These DJs are inspired. And we are inspired by them. It’s the same way people before me were inspired by Larry Levan and Ron Hardy and these legendary names that we always talk about.

The thing that is consistent among all of them, I think, is that quite often people will say, “He isn’t the greatest mixer.”

Exactly, but it was mind-blowing. The whole DJ technique thing came up when the American DJs of the early ’90s started. The impeccable mixes of David Morales or Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez. These people were playing on 40 thousand watt sound systems and they had to be impeccable, because if you train-wreck there, it’s quite a mess. And you cannot play with the levels in a violent way. You have to be quite good on the technical side.

There’s stuff that I do sometimes with a filter or I do with a delay. There’s some mixes where I totally filter an Indian or Indonesian percussion record and I put it on top of a house track. If I do it on 40 thousand watts, I’ll kill somebody or damage people’s ears. I can do it on a more contained sound system and get away with it. Anthony “Shake” Shakir has this way of mixing house music that is exactly the way you mix hip hop. People think it’s not really a proper way of mixing, but I think it is the proper way of mixing, even house music.

That’s the thing that excites me about people like Ben UFO and Martyn. It’s a very UK way of mixing, but I guess the American analogue would be to say that it’s a very hip hop way of mixing.

Exactly. That’s their own, and nobody should take it away from them. It’s a style, and if you have style you have everything. This is why I love Shake when he plays as a DJ. He is emotional in a way. You see that he is stuck in an era where things were much purer than no. So you look at the crowd when he is playing and the crowd is looking really weird. They’re saying, “He doesn’t know how to mix.” No. He is half-beating the records. He’s putting a beat on the half-beat. So he’s doing dub-dub-dub-dub, which is something we were doing in the early ’90s just for fun. That’s where he is coming from. That’s his style.

What is exciting you musically these days?

Charles Cohen, of course, especially seeing him playing live. It’s incredible to see the approach of that man to music. The music world in his head…

What specifically about it?

Improvisation normally is a very introverted way of communicating. If it’s a solo improvisation, I improvise with my own ideas and my own instruments and I bring my instrument to a level where people can realize how good I am at mastering this instrument. But Charles goes beyond there. In another interview where I was with him, they asked me what moved me the most in his music. I said the rhythm. He has an ancient rhythm, this extremely ancient rhythm inside of him.

Did he respond to that?

He was like, “Yeah, I like old traditional music.” But everybody likes traditional and old music, Charles has it in his blood. It’s different. It’s the way he layers his music which is completely authentic.

Is there anyone else working currently that does that for you?

There’s a level of approach to music that I hear in very few producers. One of those that I totally respect and support is Prostitutes. He has this authentic thing. It’s all a ritual thing. It’s all a ritual approach to our understanding of music.

Did you always have this feeling about music? That it’s a ritual thing, or did that realization come about at some point?

I think it’s both. In a way, it’s a process that finished in the mid-2000s, let’s say 2005. I realized that I was following a myth of modern, forward-thinking music. I would easily go back and find all this similar stuff in music. I’d already heard Japanese music before that, for example. But I was listening to some music from Japan that is probably 200, 300 years old, and it was exactly like some avant-garde compositions from 2004 or 2005.

Where were you?

I was starting the label and I was a bit confused about electronic music at the time. Not confused... but I had different views of it. And I had to go back and see the whole perspective from behind. That’s what I did. This running process, this continuous speeding and roaming and thirsting thing where you should discover new stuff, discover new records, discover new productions, ways of making new sounds, all these things. At some point I ended up stagnating. Because at this point, you feel like you’ve heard almost everything. You’ve heard all these gigantic modern musicians. And I think this is where everything stopped at some point. But I still believe that this was the breaching point. Everything you give me now to listen to, I can relate it to something that happened before. But you couldn’t say the same thing about Squarepusher or Aphex Twin or even house music that you heard in the ’80s.

So do you think we’re at a point where we just can’t go any further? Or do you think we’re just in a moment where…

No. There’s always an evolution. There is an evolution. The evolution today is in the way we’re shaping the past. An article just came out right now an article in The Wire about the saxophonist Akira Sakata. He goes from jazz to traditional Japanese music. And it’s a very violent way of approaching all this because when you are Akira Sakata, you’re never nice. I can understand why some people always tap into their own tradition, even if they go to the most advanced avant-garde, experimental free jazz level on the musical scale. You go back to the bottom end of your own land, the sand in your graveyard. It’s very important.

You’ve been DJing for years now. I’m curious as to why do you still want to make people dance? It seems like with all of the other musical interests that you have, that you might have slowed down that particular side of things.

I always ask myself the same thing. I know that I’m doing much more than dance music. I’m discovering fields and I’m still learning. It’s probably just internally a personal satisfaction. I do totally relate it to that very forward-thinking thing that I was trying to explain before where I ended up at this simple idea: “It’s a ritual.” That’s part of the ritual. It’s like having a sermon where a guy is saying something and he wants to take these words to a certain level where people start reacting to them, I don’t know, by believing or screaming or taking their clothes off. That’s the reaction I’m looking for.

This feature is part of a week of articles guest curated by 3024 label boss Martyn.

“I think what’s interesting about Morphosis is that in today’s “scene,” many musicians follow a path that has been laid out by those who came before them and almost no one deviates from that. But there are a few people that are in their own world, and create it as they go along, and i think he is one of those people. When I heard the Morphosis LP on Delsin, What Have We Learned, musically it was so separated from what is going on in house/techno, completely on its own planet. It sounds really honest and outspoken, music by someone who knows perfectly well what he’s doing. Especially “Too Far,” which touched me in a way not a lot of music does. For me, he is up there with people like Pepe Bradock, Koze, or Mr G.”

To check out more of the features that Martyn picked out, check out his guest curator hub page.

Morphosis images - Steve Braiden