Irresistible Force
by Bob Gourley

	Since his start in pirate radio a decade ago, Mixmaster Morris has been a driving force in the British underground dance scene. Being both a DJ and composer/performer, Morris has seen both sides of the DJ-driven industry.
	As resident DJ for the Shamen from 1989 to 1991, Morris went out with the band for five tours. Now he is focusing on his own music, released under the name Irresistible Force. 
	When acid house first hit, Morris was one of the first performers to play it live,  and he did over 300 shows before taking a break from playing out two years ago. Now, with an upgraded arsenal of equipment, he is getting back into live performance.

What are your feelings on the current state of the British dance music scene?

For the last couple of years, the things that boomed it was the acid house explosion, the independent techno label explosion. And everyone was trying to jump on the techno bandwagon, but it got that you had to make music to please DJs, because otherwise it wouldn't sell. So everything got very much the same. In the last year, I think a lot of people have broken out of that and it's been the success of people like me and The Orb and the Aphex Twin in particular, that have liberated people from having to make records for DJs. Within the last year, the whole techno market has switched over dramatically, from Vinyl 12 inches to CD albums, which has also had a definite impact. Which one is the cause and which is the effect is hard to say. People are becoming aware of a history that goes back to beyond 1986 and starting to listen to German electronic music and early Kraftwerk in large numbers, which they never did before.

What first attracted you to the music?

I've been into avant garde music for about 10 or 15 years, and I've never been interested in pop music. It was never enough for me. I suppose a key point was when I went to see Steve Reich in 1983 and I suddenly thought 'I want to be doing this.' This has got all the things that I like in music and none of the things that are boring.


What impact does being also a DJ have on your music?

It's vital. In England, DJs have had all the importance, DJs are the taste-makers. Without DJs' support, you won't get your music heard. It did occur to me a year ago that nearly all the worthwhile techno music coming out wasn't getting heard, because DJs didn't have the bullocks to play it. They're so concerned with making people dance. For the last three years I've totally thrown this idea out the window, and of course, I've been doing rooms where nobody's dancing, everybody's all lying down, which opens up far more possibilities for what type of music you can play. I've been playing a much, much wider range of music, and I guess although Alex will get the credit for the first chill-out room and use of the word, I've got the credit for inventing a way of mixing all this music, which basically to use modal music and have it all annotated by keys, and to mix keys together instead of beats. And now I'm seeing a whole new generation of DJs all copying this.

You've been making your own music for quite a while. What was it like in the beginning?

I started off with one-man synthesizer music and went on to one-man sampler music, and I used to go out with instruments that would only hold one sample at a time, so each track was just one sound, very minimal. But then I got an Emax in '85 and have been using that ever since.

How do you feel about the renewed interest in analog equipment?

Part of it is a vote of no-confidence in the current equipment, for a lot of people it's saying 'we need the knobs.' It was something that I predicted, and it's got to such a state in England that the prices of analog synthesizers have got completely ridiculous. They're about three to four times what they are state-side, which is why I buy mine in the States! Britain's got a lot to catch up, quite honestly, because all of Europe, especially Germany, has a type of music called electronic music. In England, they don't. They have obviously pop-electronic and industrial and stuff like that, but there really is no equivalent to German electronic music, and there are really no electronic music studios in the whole of England, apart Peter Gabriel's, which is surprising.

Why do you think Europe has been quicker to embrace this style of music?

I don't know, but music in England is very different from in Europe. In Europe there are lots and lots of different marginal musics that co-exist happily side by side. In England, it's very tribal, one thing is in and everything else is out, and the press always concentrates on one thing at a time. It used to be even more hysterical than it is now. In a way, now the audience has fragmented because techno and rock have their separate identities. England's music industry is quite different from the rest of the world somehow, and somehow it works and does produce good things.

Did the media's latching onto rave culture play a big role?

It massively popularized the rave and made it the moral panic of the day. Without coming to England, it's very hard to imagine how large and how all pervasive the house and techno scene is. It's the dominant mode of music, it's not a marginal music. It is pop music, and everything else is marginal now. There are so many forms of it. I do get the feeling that America is the last country to have understood it and has the least understanding of it. People who haven't been here can't know what we're talking about, because it is so big over here.

Did that hurt the scene, because of too many people were trying to cash in on it, or help it, by opening the door for new talent?

There's always bad commercial stuff coming out, and when there's money involved, bad commercial people will get into it. House music, of course, was commercialized to death, and really is in a sick way. Nowadays, it's ambient music. Eventually the same thing will happen, but at the moment it's still very, very healthy. There is a flood of records coming out, but most of them are not on major labels and are actually very good.

Are the fans smart enough to seek out innovative material rather than being satisfied with the commercial stuff?

I think in the last year we've created a discerning, indie, alternative techno audience. People are looking for techno that is clichˇ-free and is very distinctly removed from either hardcore or garage, because both those are now very, very narrow and boring and drive me crazy.  I think a year ago most people didn't understand the difference between techno and hardcore and I guess this year they've learned  it. Hardcore is really despised by all but a tiny minority at the moment - those people have pushed themselves off the end of a cliff, really.

Do you think the smaller size of England making it easier for the indie labels made the music catch on faster than in America? 

I think it's because of the power of magazines. Because magazines like NME, Melody Maker - they don't have the power they had in the 70s, but they still have the power to break a label if they get behind a DJ or band or a label. They will break them more often than not. So it only really takes one mad person on the music papers to back you. To fix all the radio stations in America, you have to have an awful lot of money, and in England there are people who will back a band just because they believe in them. The bigger the music industry is and the more money there is in it, the more vested interest they have in preventing any sort of change. Of course, they've got lots of money vested in boring, old fashioned artists and the change is coming now. It only really took a little bit of unscrewing the hinges and then the door fell off. I think now we're going to see a real explosion of truly liberated music this year from Europe as a result of the ambient explosion. It won't just be a load of Aphex impersonators or Orb impersonators or Morris impersonators, it will be something new and original.

Does the length of ambient tracks present a problem in marketing it?

Well, obviously, it's not three minute radio-friendly music. It's 70 minute, lie-on-the-floor music. It doesn't have a lot of teeny appeal, but on the other hand it's proving to appeal to all age groups. We're selling records across the board, in all sorts of different shops: dance shops, indie shops, and hippie and new age shops.



What is your approach to live shows? Do you use DATS?

There is a place to use DATs as a sound source, but rather than that, I'd just put things on CDs anyway. When I used to do my live shows, I used to use turntables and CD players as part of the live gig, and that's a different thing entirely, because I wanted to completely blur the boundary between live performance and DJing. I used to perform live stuff out of the DJ booth, and the idea was no one would know which one was an import record and which one was a track. So if they couldn't tell the difference, then it meant that my tracks were good as the Chicago tracks.

What do you think of bands that rely almost entirely on DATs, not playing or manipulating anything live?

I think the record companies will soon be trying to promote the pretty techno acts. They'll be trying to sell some sort of Marky Mark of techno. With acts like that, they won't be making the music anyway, so there's no way they could be performing it live. They'd just be miming it and it would be horrible, we could go boo-hiss and them.
I hold a strong view that techno belongs to the people that actually make it, not to the accountants and record companies and even DJs, really. It belongs to people who actually know something about computers and technology and for too long these people have been making records for peanuts, for famous DJs. And these people have got to break out and do their own things now.

What is the next stop for electronic music?

The big next technological change will be in the abolition of tape, because people are going towards direct disk recording, and it's definitely going to have effects in ways that we can't foresee yet, given that it allows you to do lots of non-destructive edits. I would guess it would allow a lot of more improvisation and choosing the best bit, a lot more added to the process. Like with sampling, people will also find boring things to do with it that we haven't even thought of yet that are tedious and dull. 
New things have got to happen in the digital domain. I'd like to see new types of digital processing, not just emulating reverbs and delays.

Copyright 1994 Bob Gourley