Souls by Morwell

Morwell's full-length debut recalls the collision of adrenaline, euphoria and dread at long-ago outdoor raves, free parties, and the Jah Shaka soundsystem. The focus is on overpowering, physical sound, and on the ability of the soundsystem to configure new bodily and emotional states.

In the sound-world of Souls, living organisms fuse with broken circuits, duplicating mutant song fragments whose meanings can no longer be decoded. At times (There Is No Time, Biosonics), we are trapped inside a monstrous body / machine, whose heartbeat has become a soundsystem. At others (Uprising, Channels), auditory pleasure is delivered on the very edge of collapse, carried along by sounds of protest and crowd-control. Is the sound-machine waking the sedated audience to action, or just weaving the noise of approaching breakdown into one last seductive sonic fiction? In Relics and Corrupted, future intelligences probe damaged circuits, trying to rekindle human music. Throughout, dream sequences crystalise into momentarily-coherent memories of long-abandoned dancefloors.

Souls explores the scope to create still-new conjunctions of sonic force and feeling from ancient elements of the UK’s folk soundsystem / rave traditions. It reflects on the pleasure and peril of the search for the new, echoing Huysmans’ fin de siècle novel A Rebours (Against Nature). The hero’s search for ever-more novel and extreme aesthetic pleasures ends only in disenchantment and mental collapse. Souls reflects on the physicality and spirituality of sound, the search for new sensations, and the disparity between euphoric communal experiences and our retreat into pleasures experienced alone, in states of uncertainty and imminent collapse.

@maxmorwell

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