A.Morgan returns to Joton’s Newrhythmic label with a four-tracker EP full of his signature, well-crafted, hypnotic funky beats.
What’s going on in A.Morgan’s studio is something that a lot of other producers miss. It is one thing to make generic Techno proficiently and another thing entirely to engage with the music in a professional, well informed, and heavily nuanced fashion. There’s not a lot of complexity in A.Morgan’s tunes. He builds up an amalgam of tiny and correct changes that reflect on the sum of the music, and the overall result is a sophisticated, funky, minimal, and entirely well-built Techno track.
Tracks like “Feel” really make you want to understand what his mind is going through when choosing a saturation setting, subtle compression, or what EQ moves are there that create this specific feeling that feels ultimately correct but is not specifically stated. There’s a lot of atmosphere and enough reverb in this track that lends itself to a presence and has to push through to create a static tension against the groove.
“Pepper Head” is also like this, where there’s a certain atmosphere that creates a jumping off point. If you start listening for the atmosphere and the space in between, you start getting into the track in a deeper sense… the funky timing of the interstitial elements and rhythms feel larger than life and very abstract in their shape as they envelop your head.
“The Answer” is one can assume an allusion to the ‘call and response’ rhythmic formatting. But it also relies on this immersion of abstract shapes as they dance around your mind’s eye. The collection of elements is almost a high brow version of ‘Wonky Techno’ where things are just unsettling enough to be really funky. However, once again, the elements are so well polished sonically, that they sound like well worn river rocks, or sea glass as they pass through the sonic stage. “Navigator” on the EP is a different direction than most of the EP, but features no less craftsmanship when it comes to the bass line, and funky timing in all the elements, since the groove is featured heavily as the main idea.
There’s a lot of people making Techno these days, but very few really have a foundation and understanding of the music like A.Morgan who is both at home making all the elements sound as best they possibly can, but also attempting to make them groove in a funky and unique way that is all his own. Great work from A.Morgan on this release.
-Sean Ocean
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