Musician and Senior Lecturer in Music at the Wits School of Arts, Dr Jonathan Crossley has presided over the most intriguing marriage of sonic experimentation between human and machine in his series of four albums titled son0_morph.
Described by Austrian-American composer and percussionist, Lukas Ligeti as a “musical polymath”, using a range of systems (both hardware and software) Crossley released the first two parts of what is being regarded as his most ambitious project to date in March.
Son0_Morph 1:trio is the first album in the four-part album series and is regarded as post-rock, free improvisation and future jazz recorded live at Figure of 8 studios in Johannesburg in early December 2020.
Convening for a four-hour free-improvised session with fellow South African musicians Carlo Mombelli on bass and Jonno Sweetman drums, Crossley (on the guitar and electronics) conducts an experimental playground of sounds that play together in an intriguing way. It juxtaposes the structured predictability of melody with erratic, techy glitch sounds like internet dial tones, amp feedback, frequency crackling and pre-21st century arcade games.
Recorded in a single sitting at the Wits Great hall (in the middle of the night), Son0_Morph 2:duo/piano wanders from the futuristic jazz-improv realm into an ambient and contemporary classical realm with South African, New York-based Kathleen Tagg on piano.
In this four-track album, the piano takes centre stage with Taggs’ fingers dancing from key to key in pretty, melodic flow with the odd erratic hop, skip and jump between more sinister notes that thread into the overall experimental aspect of the project.
Crossley’s electric guitar howls at crescendoing piano chords in the overwhelmingly moving 14-minute track “On the Wings of Battered Birds”.
Step into the twilight zone of sounds in part three of the four-part album project son0_morph:03 Duo/Cor Anglais.
The four works that make up son0_morph:03 Duo/Cor Anglais are free improvisations with technologist and wind instrumentalist Cameron Harris and explore a textured soundscape with a densely disquieting feel. He describes this section of work as the most challenging record in the set, as the electroacoustic and avant-garde classical sound comes from opposite standpoints.
Son0_morph culminates in son0_morph:04 Solo/Prayers for Prejudice: a solo outing of various classical guitars and electronics and the last part to the project released this May. It comprises of three original compositions, two works by the Baroque lutenist Sylvius Leopold Weiss (1687-1750) and one by the guitarist and composer Ralph Towner.
This final section was inspired by the work of Nils Frahm and Olafur Arnalds amongst others that finesse the entire four-part album project while acting as a reflective journey into Crossley’s history as a performer.
Although quite academic in motive having been put forward as a conceptual framework wherein Crossley explores how digital environments interact with genre fluidity when they meet poly-genre improvisatory contexts, son0_morph is a sonic spectacle with a strange, improvised beauty that can be appreciated by all.
