Michael Morley - May Songs - Kōpūtai / Port Chalmers, New Zealand

May Songs by Michael Morley, filmed in Kōpūtai / Port Chalmers, New Zealand, May 2024.
Created with the release of Morley's new LP "Pushed Streets" on Thin Wrist Recordings / Black Editions Group. Album available at: www.blackeditionsgroup.com/tw...
Over the last ten years, Michael Morley has embraced the acoustic guitar as the means of channeling the darkest threads that have run through his work since the early 1980’s. While he largely made a name for himself as a maverick of primitive electric guitar and electronics in The Dead C and Gate, Morley’s love of song form has never been far from the surface. In recent years, chance discoveries of Spanish and classical guitar records languishing in the discount and free bins at junk shops in South Dunedin proved to be a revelation. These records, largely recorded in the 1950’s and 60’s, began to shift Morley’s work and lead him to piece together a new musical language from elements completely removed from the rock and avant-garde underground from which he first emerged. Spanish, Mexican and South American composers such as De Fossa, Ponce, Lauro, Barrios, Pujol, Albéniz, Falla, and Villa-Lobos as well as more traditional classical guitar composers like Schubert, Haydn, and Scarlatti all began to etch themselves into his consciousness. Rather than emulate them, Morley “channeled the experience of listening to these strange guitar sounds” as he began to play the acoustic guitar for hours at a time every day as an almost meditative exercise and a way of discovering a new way to play.