Loscil

Websites:  http://www.loscil.ca/
Origin: Vancouver, British Columbia
Biography:

Scott Morgan lives in Vancouver, BC where he creates sound-effects for video games and makes music. He took the name Loscil from the Csound compuer program, it is a compound of "loop" and "oscillate." As a student at Simon Fraser University he studied composition; making electro-acoustic music and playing drums in bands. He sent kranky a demo in 2001, and all but one of the tracks on it made it the debut Loscil CD Triple Point. Inspired by a physics textbook, Morgan told Sadness Is In The Sky that "initially I was interested in the idea of trying to represent an abstract, scientific concept in a musical form as a kind of figure or table... I found the language of thermodynamics to be quite evocative, particularly in relation to music." If the pulsing waves of sound on the CD weren't so involving, none of these concepts would be worth notice, of course. As Julianne Shepherd wrote in the Portland Mercury in Dec. 2201; "The titles of the songs essentially describe what the music sounds like; 'Pressure,' for instance, sounds exactly like a group of beakers bubbling with condensation, or fissures in the earth breathing out vapor... ".

Loscil went on tour with Stars of the Lid in Europe and played shows in the Pacific Northwest where he integrated sound and visuals. A single was released on the British Involve label and slowly and surely Loscil gained recognition as North American independent electronica drew away from the forming influences of the Artificial Intelligence compilations and became worthy of notice on its own terms. Eschewing glitch for its own sake or breakbeat promiscuity, Loscil works in real depth of field.

Morgan began work on his second full length release, with each track named after a famous submarine. A good deal of the music used as building blocks on the Submers CD came from sampled and transformed classical music. Morgan told the Loop website in 2003 that "what does get used is usually not recognizable after I have processed it, but that is the source material I tend to work with because I like the depth in timbre of much orchestral music." Depth is a word that gets used a lot in describing Submers, the titular theme of submersion and aquatic imagery tend to appear in a lot of reviews of the album:

"Despite every track being named after a submarine, the music within is far from being in any way murky, claustrophobic or mechanical; it possesses both crystalline clarity and a slowly undulating, enveloping beauty. Layers of stripped-back notes ebb and flow over rhythms that, in their barely audible sparseness, sound for all the world to be rising from some far-off tonal ocean; a foreground of clicks and crackles billows throughout like sea spray in the wind."
-Stelfox XLR8R Nov. 2002

Scott Morgan worked away on his third album throughout 2003, using real instruments and input from other musicians. With sound sources that ranged from sampled instruments to miscellaneous lo-fi mini-cassette recordings, Morgan generated music on computer by custom programming sequencing and processing designed so that no two performances of the patches would be exactly the same. In turn, Jason Zumpano on fender rhodes piano, Tim Loewen on guitar and Nyla Rany on cello improvised over those electronic sequences. Morgan then edited and mixed the live and premixed sections together. The resulting album, First Narrows, will be out in May 2004.

Loscil is the electronic/ambient music project of Scott Morgan, from Vancouver, BC. The name Loscil is taken from the "looping oscillator" function (loscil) in Csound. Scott Morgan is also the drummer for the Vancouver indie band Destroyer.

A self-released album titled A New Demonstration of Thermodynamic Tendencies caught the attention of experimental music label Kranky who signed Morgan on to release his first album Triple Point in 2001. Triple Point features six tracks off his first independent release as well as four new tracks.

Loscil followed up the release with Submers, an aquatic-themed album. Each track on the album is named after a submarine. The last track on the album was produced in honour of the people who died on the Russian submarine K-141 Kursk.

His 2004 album First Narrows (a reference to the official name of the Vancouver bridge, also known as Lions' Gate Bridge) marked the incorporation of improvised performances by a number of guest musicians: Nyla Raney, cello; Tim Loewen, guitar; and Jason Zumpano, Rhodes piano. Consequently, the songs were more organic and looser in nature than his previous work which he performed alone.

Eight of his songs were featured on the film score of the 2004 documentary ScaredSacred by award-winning documentary filmmaker Velcrow Ripper.

Stases is an album made up of background drones from his other albums. It was released for free on the website for the One record label.

The theme of his fourth album, released in 2006, continues the conceptual ascent each album has taken, from the sub-atomic level (Triple Point) and watery depths (Submers) to the surface (First Narrows) and the sky (Plume). Plume continues his musical integration of other musicians into his ambient compositions, including Josh August Lindstrom on vibes and xylophone and Krista Michelle Marshall and Stephen Michael Wood on ebow guitar (as well as Zumpano again on piano).

Vancouver-based Scott Morgan is a disciples of Brian Eno's Before And After Science. Armed with an arsenal of electronic instruments, Morgan (disguised under the moniker Loscil), pens brief instrumental vignettes. Triple Point (Kranky, 2001) samples Morgan's first self-released album, A New Demonstration Of Thermodynamic Tendencies, inspired by thermodynamic concepts and formulas. The techno vapors of Hydrogen and Fuel Exergy, the industrial pulse of Zero, the haunting sci-fi soundscapes of Pressure, Discrete Entropy and Enthalpy recycle old ideas with modern means. Richard Bone has been doing for many years. The longer Conductivity and Absolute capture different aspects of sound, but then don't find much to do with them.

The "watery" theme of Submers (Kranky, 2002) helped Morgan craft a much more focused and creative work. The album is a stylitic tour de force that runs the gamut from the subliminal, and quasi-gothic, kosmische musik of Mute and Triton to the tribal techno of Gymnate. Argonaut whirls with the dervish-like flavor of Terry Riley's Rainbow in Curved Air, set against a solemn undercurrent of drones a` la Brian Eno's Music For Airports. The harsh electronic pulsation of Le Plongeur loops around eerie background drones. The psychedelic quality of Resurgam and the massively tragic quality of the Kursk requiem herald an artist who has emotions besides ideas.

Scott Morgan uses real instruments on First Narrows (Kranky, 2004), but the studio processing is so intense that the difference is only one of timbres. Lucy Dub still has some repetitive patterns, sometimes reminiscent of Terry Riley's undulating structures, although somewhat indecisive and shapeless. The guitar sings the melody of Ema. The organic, amoebic evolution of Mode is spoiled by sloppy beats. Sure, Brittle has some haunting, angelic cosmic drones; and the instruments pen the ten-minute new-age impressionism of First Narrows (with a dub-like cadence and languid guitar wails) and the intense nine-minute psalm of Cloister. But, overall, this sounds like a less focused work than its predecessors, and the lo-fi beats truly annoy in the long run.

Scott Morgan apparently appropriated his Loscil alter ego from the operation code within the sound synthesis system Csound. Although he admitted he rarely used Csound to create his compelling minimalist recordings, he asserted that looping and oscillating were the basics of his music-making process. Drawing stated influence from contemporary post-techno musicians such as Oval and Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas, as well as early electronic music pioneers such as Brian Eno and Raymond Scott, he issued several ambient albums for the Kranky label, including Triple Point (2001), Submers (2002), First Narrows (2004), Plume (2006), and Endless Falls (2010).
-John Bush, Rovi