You've used lockdown as the perfect opportunity to bunker down and make music. Can you tell us about your production experience and process in isolation?

Isolation was a wild time for me – at the peak of it I was in an apartment in Artarmon by myself for a month and a bit. I spent a lot of time walking around and soaking up the amazing parks in a part of the city I had never been to before. I set my studio up in the living room and it was the first time I had ever worked for an extended time in a space that wasn’t my bedroom and it was mind-blowingly helpful for me.

The other side of isolation was that I had all this free time and no excuse not to make music – it amounted to a lot of pressure and anxiety over not meeting self imposed deadlines and not being inspired all the time. Luckily I have an amazing network of people to talk to when those feelings hit. Also reading posts from artists I adore, saying that they were feeling the same thing helped me realize that the whole world was going through it together.

You record a lot of sounds to use in your own music. What's your favourite unexpected thing you've recorded?

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Great question! Some of my most used recordings were all taken on the same day, recorded in the rain forest in Calan park. I just walked around stomping on leaves, hitting sticks and bits of bamboo into the ground. Afterwards I chopped up all the sounds and named the ones I liked stuff like “crisp_clop_short” or “boom_dirty_funpal”. The names are stupid but have become super vital to my workflow. Those sort of organic sounds are fantastic for percussion, and I love them because they aren’t just clean drum sounds – there could be a bird far in the background or a footstep in the distance or someone absolutely demolishing a kebab as they walk past you. The tails of all these sounds add up and interact with each other and that does so much to create atmosphere and interest in the space between the beats.

I also have a few amazing recordings from a night spent in a freezing cold sheering shed with my good amigos Bodie and Jack. We just got really high and went on a sonic adventure. Bodie doesn’t remember this part, but he did a bit of ASMR talking into the mic about fridges and I laugh whenever I hear it.

You were playing and putting on regular gigs as both yourself and Lovejoy pre-Covid. Has being forced to slow down changed the sort of music you are listening to and producing?

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I have always had periods where listening to dance music hasn’t been my priority – whether I’m listening to soul or disco or ambient stuff, or just resting my ears, I’ve never been able to predict or control what kind of stuff I want to listen to or make. When I play out, I’m usually just trying to find the right song for each moment, so I suppose not having a crowd to work off and read has meant that I am just following my intuition a little more, but that’s hard for me to judge.

"I just walked around stomping on leaves, hitting sticks and bits of bamboo into the ground"

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Morgan has put together a BuyMusicClub playlist titled 'Sneaky Textured Dancers'. I’m drawn to a lot of these songs because of how textured and well balanced they are. I’ve been fascinated with organic and trancey sounds recently, and have been trying to fuse these seemingly disparate noises together, like a robot made of grass. This list features music from Idaban records (the organic parts) and Ute records (some of the best new trance I’ve ever heard!).

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Your organisational system on your USB has always inspired me to get my act together with Rekordbox. Can you talk us through some of your playlist names?

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‍I’ve tried a lot of different ways of sorting my music on there, and I am still yet to find a perfect system, but I am getting closer! Every month I create three new playlists: Dancers, Prancers and Chancers (or Machine, Organic and Cooked depending on how I’m feeling at the start of the month) and whenever I add a new song or rediscover an old one in that month I add it to one of those playlists. Dancers consists of mostly quantized dance music, Prancers is more ‘human made’ music and Chancers are either ambient or strange – stuff you would play at the hairy end of kickons, or when you are relaxing at home alone. It’s great being able to look back at each month and see what I was listening to.

After putting a new song into its playlist in my “Time” folder, I add it to any other playlists I think it might fit into (don’t be scared to add a song into multiple different playlists). These playlists usually focus on a vague genre, feeling, mood or context that I want to play it in. Recently I’ve started tagging things and making intelligent playlists, but I have a lot of songs I need to go back and tag, so I still have all my old folders on my USB for now.

My favorites are my Aquarium playlist, which has a lot of beautiful cheesy trance noises at more moderate tempo’s – imagine a documentary playing at an aquarium, made with those beautiful cheesy synths that seem to be on everywhere in music from the 90s. I also love my Proto-House folder, which has a bunch of really early house music and stuff from the 80s that feels like a spiritual predecessor to everything after it. I use a lot of music from these playlists in my mix.

How would you like to see the local dance music scene grow and adapt post-lockdown?

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‍It’s going to be an Australian renaissance. Everyone is realising just how strong our local scene is, and I think a lot of people who were once supporting international acts will be getting the headline slots they deserve.
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Your dream gig / event / festival once we can all dance together again?

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I cannot wait to dance outside as the sun rises and look around at all the faces of the people that made it through. Whether its in a bunker or a park or some naughty industrial space, I know it will be worth it when it happens. All the pressure that has been building up will be released and we will all appreciate it in a way that we never could before.