CTM Festival presents Polymorphism #7: Morphosis and Hieroglyphic Being in the inaugural edition of Focus Mode, a new Berghain club night and concert program.

For its seventh installment of Polymorphism, a series promoting artists and labels whose innovative approaches to sound relentlessly subvert – or simply transgress – the established parameters of musical scenes and genres, CTM Festival presents Morphosis and Hieroglyphic Being: two axiomatic artists in experimental dance music who epitomize the spirit of radical sound mutation. The September 11 event inaugurates Focus Mode, a new monthly club night from Berghain aimed at advancing vanguard configurations of club culture and sound. Focus Mode zooms in on emerging and established artists in experimental electronic music, offering them creative free rein in weeknight sessions at Panorama Bar.

While situated on the fringes of mainstream dance music and club culture, Morphosis and Hieroglyphic Being have both garnered critical attention for their uncompromising approaches to sound. Their respective labels, Morphine Records and Mathematics Recordings, are platforms for idiosyncratic, avant-garde dance music, and their productions and DJ sets ­– aesthetic aggregates of raw, industrial techno, free jazz, post-punk and early noise, traditional musics, obscure samples mined from field and media – are simultaneously defiant and devotional, transcendent and coarsely material.

Technically unorthodox, these artists’ shared interest in process over product and textured, mutable sound manifests through distortion and polyrhythmic time signatures, improvisation and on-the-fly beatmaking, and machine manipulation. Even their most dancefloor-ready productions slip the shackles of their four-to-the-floor contemporaries, aiming instead toward electric bodies, melted minds, and the cathartic possibilities of free space.

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Morphosis

Rabih Beani is a Lebanese-born, Venetian-bred producer and DJ currently based in Berlin. Recording as Morphosis and Ra.H, he is recognized for his grainy, imaginative analog techno and intense, immersive DJ sets. His two most recent albums, Albidaya on Annihaya Records and Dismantle/Music For Vampyr on Honest Jon’s, follow a critically acclaimed 2011 debut What Have We Learned on Delsin. His label, Morphine Records, has released Hieroglyphic Being’s The Lost Transmission and The Bathroom Sessions alongside likeminded artists such as Madteo and Anthony “Shake” Shakir. Beani also performs and records with the improvisational jazz and electronica ensemble, Upperground Orchestra.

→ morphinerecords.com
→ soundcloud.com/rabih

Hieroglyphic Being

Jamal Moss, also known as Hieroglyphic Being, The Sun God, and IAMTHATIAM, is an experimental composer, DJ, and sound artist. His raw, kinetic style is deeply rooted in Chicago’s house and techno scene, where he cut his teeth as a DJ and producer and currently resides. A prolific producer, Moss has over 30 releases on his own Mathematics Recordings and its subsidiaries, and has released on a number of other labels, including Spectral Sound and Klang Elektronik. Read an interview with Moss and download his 2012 FACT mix here.

→ mathematicsrecordings.blogspot.de

Polymorphism

An unprecedented range of sound has today been made available through digitization and the development of new technologies. Our acoustic environments are saturated by diverse influences and constantly in flux. With Polymorphism, CTM introduces artists who, rather than limiting or refining the scope of their sound to subscribe to existing genres, categories, or expectations, embrace the challenge of hybridity. Disregarding conventions of quality, taste, and target audience, these artists draw inspiration from open archives and the malleability of modern technology, recontextualizing and recombining to discover new and mutant expressive forms. The resulting styles may be at once chaotic and wholly coherent, amorphous and hazy or packed with strong contrasts, yet are never anything less than resolutely eclectic and subjective. With Polymorphism – a cross breed of ­club night, concert, and experimental laboratory ­– CTM presents artists who explore the artistic possibilities of a contemporary moment in which everything counts as a viable source and no rules apply.