Morgan Packard Airships Fill The Sky/Unsimulatable CD

Morgan Packard's debut solo full-length, Airships Fill the Sky, finds him folding cello, accordion and saxophone into a decidedly digital context -- involving fragmented elements of techno, house, breakbeat-oriented microsound and post-ambient tendencies -- retaining his acoustic sensibilities in earnest, while taking advantage of his long-time immersion in a variety of electronic genres. While he has further honed the melodic, textural meanderings from some of his past work, here Packard returns to his rhythmic roots, and continues to filter his jazz and classical background through everything he does. Deftly using his self-made software techniques, he puts these pieces together with a view towards the hypnotic power of the loop, coupled with a distancing from it. From the opening title track's accordion lines to house bumps, to "Mink Hills" -- with its symphonic clusters sitting harmoniously in layers of horizontal sound and clattering percussion pops -- to the unabashedly funk-filled synth movements of "Waterbugs" -- Packard manages to span a variety of musical choices and retain a coherence throughout. The accompanying Unsimulatable DVD provides a snapshot into the collaboration between Packard and Joshue Ott. Ott uses his homemade software, entitled SuperDraw, to wield a flexible, visual instrument. Using a digital drawing tablet and pen to input simple sketches of lines into the computer, Ott bends these lines to create something far removed from the original input. SuperDraw examines and interprets the constant motion -- both of the hand/stylus as it moves around the tablet, and of the line after it exists inside the software. This analysis allows the creation of movement that is inspired by the results of the original input, lending itself to a cycle of input/output that is consistently influencing and referencing itself. The collaboration between Ott and Packard (which includes almost exclusively different music from the CD) is the culmination of two years of playing live shows together and consistently honing their interaction and the means by which their computers communicate with each other. The DVD portion is in NTSC format, region 0, 36:59 minutes long; the music featured on the DVD is exclusive to this format.