Echoes by Memeshift

Echoes, Chinabot’s first release with Morgan Sully of Memeshift, takes us from Borneo to Berlin, collapsing decades and continents through electronic experimentation and personal recordings. Through the process, he asks if it is possible to reconfigure a cohesive sense of home from the diverse elements of a diasporic experience.

Echoes’ fifth track, Balikpapan, takes its name from one of Sully’s first homes, a city on the eastern coast of Borneo that Sully fled with his family as a six-year-old in 1986. When his American father couldn't pay the bribe asked by corrupt local officials to validate their exit visas, his family hired a smuggler to ferry them by sampan from Batam Island across the Strait of Singapore. Under the cover of darkness, after the gunboats passed, they found themselves on a secluded beach in Malaysia, the first leg of a journey that took young Sully to many homes between Hawaii and (eventually) Southern California.

Balikpapan was started shortly before returning to the city, some 35 years after he left, and features a field recording of insects from a mangrove swamp near his former school. Pulsing with humid, clicking beats, and laced with haunting synths, Balikpapan transports us into the physical environment, as well conjuring an emotional landscape filled with a complicated nostalgia.

The journey through time and memory is revisited in Sad Sunda, which samples a cassette of ‘pop sunda’, a form of popular music that blends western pop and traditional instrumentation from Java, that his mother brought with the family to Hawaii when they fled Borneo. Composed on an Elektron Octatrack over three decades later, Sully cut the samples into small snippets and randomly resequenced them. The percussion is from Roland CR-78 samples and drum loops pitched down and resampled in the Octatrack; through the frenetic club beats, we hear his current life in Berlin, where he now lives, bleeds into the music of his past.

His migratory experience is apparent in Sully’s music influences, which he names as “Sundanese gamelan, the Beach Boys, pop melayu and eventually punk, industrial, and noise before utterly relinquishing to the music of clandestine raves of Southern California in the late 90s.” For Echoes, Sully synthesises all these through his DIY electronic lens, finding both a sense of playfulness and a melancholia. “Echoes is an attempt at recollecting a hybrid sonic language, an unattainable and elusive ‘home’,” Sully says.

The album ends with a trip to his mother’s actual home. The churning, meditative Mom_s Kettle was recorded in his mother’s California apartment in 2021, as she was recovering from an anti-Asian hate attack that hospitalized her, part of a wave of violence that had become a second, shadow pandemic throughout the United States during the Covid pandemic.

The track relies on deeply personal, diaristic textures. “The sound of my mom's kettle which starts off the track, was recorded on my iPhone while I searched for talismans to bring to my mom in the hospital,” says Sully. “The pointillist melodies came later in Berlin from a recording session with my friend, while the granulated percussion originates from heavily compressed recordings of the recorder shuffling in my bag.” In a final personal touch, the colours of his mother’s hand-made dayak Borneo beadwork inform the Echoes album cover, embodying the spirit of the record – a creative force that blossoms despite aggression and displacement.


About the artist

Memeshift is the artist name of Morgan Sully, a Berlin-based organizer and experimental electronic musician who draws creative strength from the vast diasporas of his fellow southeast Asian kin. Previously, Morgan co-curated Soy&synth, an experimental concert series with Indonesian collective Soydivision, co-releasing much of the output on their sister label L-KW alongside MidnightShift. Morgan is also initiator of Latent Sonorities, a project with the House of Indonesian Cultures – Rumah Budaya Indonesia – Berlin (RBI) and Morphine Records Raum developing an open source sample pack and tuning files of Javanese gamelan instruments from RBI’s instrument collection. Its public co-release with Yogyakarta’s Yes No Wave was accompanied by a concert series, DAW tools, live-recorded album and guide for other artists and researchers working to expand our sonic imaginaries.

Chinabot is a platform and collective created to change the dialogue surrounding Asian music.

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