Morgan Geist

Metro Area 04 was one of the best house records of last year. Strut is what happens when you set Ballad Of Dorthy Parker from Sign O' The Times by Prince to a house beat, brilliant! Search any of the Environ 12"s, althought they are hard to find these days. Also look for his 1997 album on Clear called The Driving Memoirs. It is very difficult to find these days as Clear is a done deal and Clair is doing DeFocus now, but worth your while.

What mt said. Geist is probably one of my five favorite producers right now. The Metro Area material released thus far (Paradise Garage + Paisley Park + late '80s Detroit + old school R&B + ???) has left me all flummoxed and fluttery.

Search: everything.

Morgan Geist - I Want To - Freezone 4 compilation
---this was the first Geist tune i regulary used in my dj sets. similar to the metro area stuff but with more of a detroit slant.

Kelly Polar Quartet - Environ 12"s
---both 12"s are gorgeous housey expeditions with Geist lending a hand in the production.

i love that "i want to" track - i can send u it adam.

he did 'the driving memoirs' soundtrack as well, which is pretty good. i never listen to it as much as the more recent stuff tho.

ENV026
MORGAN GEIST
MOST OF ALL

A new solo undertaking from the Environ bossman was overdue for a while now, so it is with pride that we present to you the new 12" from Mr. Geist, MOST OF ALL featuring Jeremy Greenspan from Junior Boys!

The song "Most of All" is the result of Geist's increasing interest in
songwriting and arrangement coupled with a obsession with epic,
purely-electronic albums, spurred on in large part by the collaboration with Junior Boys main man Jeremy Greenspan, a like-minded lover of great electronic bands (favorites including YMO, Logic System, Japan, and Talk Talk) and...well, yes, disco. With Greenspan's unique voice floating over Geist's highly-detailed production, the result is part romantic standard, part lost new wave memories, part space-disco and part something unknown. The B1 instrumental version on the flip streamlines the arrangement into
something fit for the floor, yet retains the essence of the song within.
Finally, the second B-side track "Skyblue Pink" is Geist's homage to
memories of summer days in the 70s spent listening to synth-rock in his older brother's room, fused with the spirit of Klaus Schultz's epic electronic film works and raging power chords. Sound terrible? We assure you it is, but in the best way possible - so very wrong, its right! Enjoy!

A1: Most of All (Vocal)
B1: Most of All (Dub)
B2: Skyblue Pink

ENV025
MORGAN GEIST
RAREMIX

A 12-inch collection hard-to-find remixes by Morgan Geist.

A collection of rare and unreleased Morgan Geist remixes. First up is Daniel Wang '24 to Vector Z (Morgan Geist's Commuter Mix).' The remix takes the spacy original and reigns it into a tight, Moroder-esque robodisco workout sure to rock your floor. Next is Owusu & Hannibal 'Delirium (Morgan Geist Unreleased Dub),' lavishly adorned in tight 808 sequences and moody Detroit chords...Reflection 'Cube Loop (Morgan Geist's Modest Science Mix)' -- a bouncy treat from 1997, originally released on the highly-collectable and long defunct Clear Recordings label. Finally, the record closes with CiM 'Typical (Morgan Geist Remix).' Taking a cue from the darker Carl Craig remixes he admired at the time and racking it onto a jacking 909/808 framework, Geist left little reminder of the nearly ambient original track.:

Daniel Wang "24 to Vector Z" (Morgan Geist Commuter Mix) - 1998
Owusu & Hannibal "Delirium" (Morgan Geist Tongues Dub) - 2005*
Reflection "Cube Loop" (Morgan Geist's Modest Science Mix) - 1997
CiM "Typical" (Morgan Geist Remix) - 1998
*unreleased

I listened to the "Most of All" snippet on myspace and I really like it. Anybody heard the whole thing, since it is available on ITunes. I'm gonna wait for the vinyl, but what are your thoughts if you have? Also, anybody heard Raremix? Payday is coming soon and I plan to get both, but thoughts?

Skyblue Pink is decent if not that remarkable.

I'm finding his choice of instrumentation to be a little...chintzy? He rides that 'smooth' line too close sometimes.

wang = chic
geist = moroder

chic > moroder

wang > geist

QED

Vahid, are we gonna have to throw down?

No - I think Chic >> Moroder in many cases but not all. Though Wang > Geist? OTM.

chic >> most cerrone > moroder in robo-space-disco mode

old geist is SO different from the new stuff that it hardly makes sense to compare w/ daniel wang.

if anybody who's reading this remembers my old thread about an imaginary morgan geist + 4 hero collaboration, that album is dan curtin's "pregenesis", in parts.

amen.

So what do you think of todd terje's edits and remixes vahid?

NEW ALBUMS COMING!

Kelley Polar is apparently "really psyched" by the route his new album is
taking. We expect it to surface in final form at the start of 2007. We
master it in the fall and cannot wait to hear what the madman has concocted!

Morgan Geist is working on the new album finally! It will be almost
entirely all-new material with the exception of two reworks from the Super
EP. Look for it this fall/winter.

Finally, Metro Area are working on their new one but remain secretive about
the direction. We suspect this is because nothing has actually been
recorded and they are just sitting around talking about ideas, smoking and
eating. Lazy bastards. Look for a new something Spring 2007, preceded by a
new 12-inch in the fall.

Oh yeah...Daniel Wang has been promising a new 12 for us for a while now and
our fingers are crossed.

More tasty bits to look forward too!

attention ....

New Morgan Geist album

Morgan Geist - Double Night Time

Environ (ENVCD007)
September 15th, 2008

http://www.dotshop.se/ds/release.php?code=ENVCD007

MOST HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. FEATURING JEREMY GREENSPAN OF JUNIOR BOYS ON VOCALS *****
"Double Night Time" is the new album from Morgan Geist and his first solo artist album in over a decade. released on his own Environ imprint - home to loveables such as Kelley Polar.

After turning the dance music world on its head with his Metro Area project (alongside collaborator Darshan Jesrani) and mining rare disco gems with the seminal obscure disco DJ mix Unclassics (2004), Geist decided it was time to turn his attention to a solo album that would indulge his own early influences and guilty pleasures: techno-pop, prog rock and pure electronic music.

While "Double Night Time" is very much a solo flight, made during a challenging period in which dark personal themes inflected the compositions, Geist collaborated with friend and fellow new wave traveler Jeremy Greenspan for the vocal tracks on the album. An ardent fan of Jeremy’s band Junior Boys, Geist knew the vocalist would be perfect as a sympathetic collaborator; indeed, having remixed Junior Boys “The Equalizer” in 2006, he already knew what it was like working with Greenspan’s voice in the studio. Greenspan also co-wrote one of the tracks on the album, “City of Smoke and Flame.”

Instrumentally, the orchestra Geist employs is decidedly more Yellow Magic than philharmonic: unlike his Metro Area project or the disco music he DJs all over the world, a conscious decision was made to design an album that was almost purely electronic outside of human vocals, with classic synthetic sound design and arrangements. Geist wanted Double Night Time to be the sound of one person making music in a studio, programming a private world, recapturing the lonely and romantic sentiments associated with his formative music-making experiences. And while the conceit of a producer-as-one-man-band is well-worn in today’s digital world, Geist felt he could do it differently, aiming for the compositional richness, subtlety and dynamics of an era when artists took their time, had bigger studio budgets and a more attentive listening public.

Artist's BIO:
Morgan Geist was born and raised in New Jersey. His single-digit years were filled with music: weekdays with his mother scored by standards and musicals, weekends with his father by modern jazz, classical and experimental pop. More influential than his parents’ tastes were his older sister’s Devo, Rick James and B-52s cassettes, rivaled only by his older brother’s Pink Floyd and Yes LPs. Even Geist’s babysitter was a musician and often brought over Roland synthesizer brochures, their pages adorned with exotically-named (Jupiter, Juno), futuristic-looking Roland keyboards that captured the imagination.

The seeds of obsession sown, the idea of acquiring one of these fascinating instruments increasingly occupied Geist’s young mind. He distracted himself by making tapes of groups like UTFO and Whodini off of New York radio stations and borrowing scarce Depeche Mode and New Order imports from a European friend at school. Finally, Geist’s dream came true in the form of a four-track tape recorder, a primitive sequencer and a synthesizer (not surprisingly, a Roland). He was 15.

Four years later, Geist left the East coast for Oberlin College in Ohio. Initially inspired by England’s take on techno in the form of 808 State, ART and Black Dog Productions, his newfound proximity to Detroit allowed him to track the genre back to its Motor City innovators such as Derrick May, Carl Craig and Underground Resistance. This, in turn, inspired many trips to Detroit to buy records to play on his college radio shows. A chance friendship with techno innovator Dan Curtin led to Geist’s 1994 debut 12” on Metamorphic Records, produced entirely on a minimal setup in his dormitory room.

Geist formed his Environ label soon after, in 1995, releasing powerful statements of purpose that displayed his affinity for the more emotive strains of techno, and experimental electronic music. DJing and digging for sampling material in used record stores led to an obsession with boogie and disco, cementing a link between Geist’s productions and forgotten, classic tracks from the New York City radio of his youth. His debut album The Driving Memoirs, released in 1997, was an amalgam of disco, techno and electronic listening music created as an ode to his departed younger sister. Soon after, he singed neo-disco pioneer Daniel Wang to Environ and began working with Darshan Jesrani on what would become the first Metro Area record.

In 2002, Metro Area’s debut album (licensed to Source/Virgin) won BBC Online’s #1 Album of the Year, Dancestar’s Best New Artist Album award, and earned inclusion in Rolling Stone’s Top 50 Albums of the year. Geist’s own solo EPs of the era (Super, Moves) bridged the gap between his earlier Detroit-oriented releases and Metro Area. These tracks, along with Metro Area, were licensed to innumerable compilations, DJ mixes, and advertisements, arguably helping to spearhead a sea change in the direction of underground dance music towards the strange no-man’s-land that existed between new wave, R&B and disco that is still being explored today.

Currently, Geist continues to run Environ, releasing his solo and Metro Area recordings alongside like-minded artists such as Kelley Polar, Daniel Wang and Baby Oliver. A highly regarded remixer, Geist has lent his touch to a wide range of artists including jazz greats Hugh Masekela and Phil Ranelin, new wave heroes Telex, and contemporary pop darlings Franz Ferdinand, The Rapture, Erlend Oye, Tiga, Phonique and Junior Boys. In addition to production, Geist is booked regularly worldwide as a DJ (his 2003 mix CD and 12” series, Unclassics, is regarded as essential listening to those uninitiated to the world of obscure electronic disco) and has reentered the world of radio with his monthly show, tellingly entitled Personal with Morgan Geist.

Tracklisting:
1. Detroit
2. The Shore
3. Nocebo
4. Most Of All
5. Skyblue Pink
6. Ruthless City
7. Palace Life
8. City Of Smoke And Flame
9. Lullaby

UPTOWN EXPRESS DOWNTOWN LOCO

Exciting

Driving Memoirs - what sort of vein is it in? As i see I can buy the MP3s on Juno.

Awesome.

Driving Memoirs is similar to Landcruising by Carl Craig and Reflections by As One or perhaps even Soma by B.12. It's one of my favorite albums in that modified detroit techno style. Buy it without hesitation.

It's like Landcruising? Sold.

i don't think it's very much like "landcruising", "reflections" or "electro-soma" ... and also i don't think any of those three albums sounds very similar!

i am curious what brotherlovesdub is getting at, though.

i always thought that as far as timbres + sounds go geist's early techno tracks sounded closest to juan atkins' "infiniti" albums ... but then he has a very individual thing with the way he uses rhythm ... the only comparison point i have for his rhythms are like russ gabriel tracks from ferox.

it's definitely strange music, very techno-auteur like ken ishii or something. doesn't lend itself well to discussions.

actually i mean it doesn't lend itself well to "description", at least in terms of "sounds like x" or "sounds like y" ... part of why he's such a popular producer is that his early work was very, very strange and wonderful. it's clearly techno in the "post-detroit" tradition (like as one or carl craig's european albums or b12, etc etc) but then as with a lot of other "post-detroit" music it's the hard-to-describe individual quirky detail bits that make it so great, and not the gross similarities.

This is indeed very good news.

Thanks Vahid, well I bought it anyway so I'll understand soon enough.

So I picked up the Driving Memoirs album and agree that it's great. Shame that a lot of the Environ stuff is so hard to come by, as I'd like to hear the early Kelley Polar Quartet singles too.

http://img380.imageshack.us/img380/6923/bhjuly41hd4.jpg

sf ^^^

LOL @ "exotic moog"

now that you have "the driving chronicles" you need "environ: into a separate space"

great stuff on a great label

so i have a ton of the tracks on that We Make It Good mix.

00:00. Roger Powell - Solar Plexus
4:00. ?? frenchie thing
8:15. ?? phone number song
12:00. ?? super spaced out cosmic
14:48. Michael Shrieve, Kevin Shrieve & Klaus Schulze - Transfer Station Blue
19.10: gah. it's killing me. i know it but can't remember.
23:53. ??
26:55. Johnny Dynell & New York 88 - Jam Hot
30:31. Adam Rush - Stop! (cover of bob-a-rella, which is a cover of lucio batisti)
33:43. ?? noisy electronic
35:26. Cristina? i don't have my music w/me here. or def something on ze.

done really well though. dig the mixing and segues.

Cheers for the tracklisting so far. Might see if any of the trainspotters over at DJ History can shed any further light on it

k. they had a few. some of which i should have known.

00:00. Roger Powell - Solar Plexus
4:00. ?? frenchie thing
8:15. kraftwerk - the telephone call (slowed down)
12:00. ?? super spaced out cosmic
14:48. Michael Shrieve, Kevin Shrieve & Klaus Schulze - Transfer Station Blue
19.10: jasper vant hoff - pili pili
23:53. ??
26:55. Johnny Dynell & New York 88 - Jam Hot
30:31. Adam Rush - Stop! (cover of bob-a-rella, which is a cover of lucio batisti)
33:43. ?? noisy electronic
35:26. Cristina? i don't have my music w/me here. or def something on ze.

wait, forgot second one (frenchie thing) is logic system 'unit'

Last one is Gina X Performance with Opposite Numbers from the X-Traordinaire LP. Incidentally, this is one of my favorite album covers:

http://img410.imageshack.us/img410/4057/ginaxxtra.jpg

Niiiiiiice Moverrrr

guh! that's it. i have that cd. that's why i couldn't find it by listening to all the cristine i had

Morgan Geist and Maurice Fulton free gig for London:

http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/london/event/?id=20

http://www.residentadvisor.net/event.aspx?146751

Fuck. "Lullaby" and "Read My Mind" are both such a great tunes!!

love the trumpet solo and kratfwerk "numbers" squiggles in Lullaby.

love the vocals on Read My Mind

love, love, love Morgan/Metro

UPTOWN EXPRESS DOWNTOWN LOCO

― haitch, Saturday, June 28, 2008 10:48 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark

otm

Storm Queen vs. the Underwater Disco

http://acuterecords.com/UnderwaterDisco.jpg

more info on the Acute Blog.

i hear dj dan selzer is pretty good

underrated.

beautiful flier ... did you make it?

Yes I did, thanks. I'm trying to get back to doing more design. It's a far cry from drawing an outlined Camaro for the Nebula Jersey EP.

If by any chance you were responsible for the Environ Bar Mitzvah Party flyer, I commend you immensely.

this flier is really, really fantastic. one of the best fliers i've seen this year.

for some reason it reminds me of this

http://www.basicchannel.com/images/records_297/w-1718a.jpg

in all the right ways, as well as david hockney too

I did do the Environ Bar Mitzvah flyer, but that was more of a collaboration with Morgan. Probably the piece of design that I've received the most accolades for!

I just heard that Storm Queen single on Beats in Space this week, really great.

the thing about the Underwater Disco flyer was adding the tone/texture. I've be reading the http://blog.iso50.com/ blog which is always posting about all these new designers that do this sort of retro 70s swiss minimalism, like old school modernism that's been left out in the sun of a california desert or beach for 30 years, and a lot of the style seems to rely on using scans of aged paper or whatever laid on top, especially now that you can do "multiply" layer effects in InDesign. It's a simple trick but effective. Without it that flyer would've looked too bright and flat. The paper scan funny enough is something I scanned almost 8 years ago for the Theoretical Girls CD cover, the first time I did that:

http://acuterecords.com/blog/?page_id=230

And I was able to do that back then because that was the first time I ever laid something out in Photoshop instead of Quark.

ha, weird- iso50 guy is my cousin

Here's an article about Storm Queen. The vocalist has an interesting story.
http://viewpointmag.com/2012/03/01/the-singer-in-the-subway-damon-c-scott-and-storm-queen/

Damn he did it again!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-rMtg_9Ev0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST2SYbE5_Vk

he dj'd saturday night at the Let's Play House party in williamsburg. Showed up the moment he got on the decks. Walked into a foggy dark room filled to the max to the immediate start of his set with some head clearing noise followed by this. It sounded amazing.

really bummed i missed that :-(

Think he started with the same thing in Chicago on the weekend, whatever it was. Very fun.

max, the place was a nightmare though! I have a new theory about the "bros" occupying the brooklyn house scene, I was going to post it to the infamous hipster house thread. How while it's great that brooklyn hipsters and kids are loving house music, suddenly all these dudes who 5 years ago would've lived in Hoboken and clubbed on the west side now live in williamsburg waterfront high-rise condos and club on Kent Ave. It was overbearing, these beefy bros who's just barrel into everyone.

oh thats so disappointing.

the last LPH party i went to was the tiger and woods one, it was fun ish and didnt seem bro-heavy but glasslands isnt the best space for a dance party, also so many people not dancing, which, whatever floats your boat, plur, but like standing right in the dance floor. no space!!

also last time i went to 285 kent (like a year ago) it was still hot as fuckkkkkk no ventilation or a/c. i know i should be hardcore and not care but cmon guys

Temp was fine. They have massive new AC. It wasn't freezing, but it was fine. Last time I was there was when Morgan DJ'd I think the first LPH party there 2 yrs ago and it was brutally hot.

yeah i was at that one too! i think. and god yeah it was so hot and stuffy and also i was carrying leftovers from some restaurant for some reason? still had a blast tho

I'm with Dan re: the "bro" contingent. Dancing upfront in front of the tables was the best place. Morgan's set sounded fantastic. (PS thanks for the ride, Dan!)

no problem.

btw, he means a ride in a car. there was no "riding" on the dancefloor.

at least not intentionally.

Think he started with the same thing in Chicago on the weekend, whatever it was. Very fun.

Really thought about going to that, but ended up with other plans. :/

Halfway expected to see you there, jaymc. Olin, the opener, was fun too. Was great to dance to "Inspector Norse" pumping on the Smartbar system!

megaprojects sounds promising

does anyone remember where i posted about the galleria, geist's freestyle collaboration with jessy lanza? they have a new song, it fuckin knocks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN1PwDIy9dk

super glad to have more from them this rules

I dunno if she's changed the ways she sings or if I've changed but I don't like this.

Yeah I love this

He put up a great Spotify playlist of 80s freestyle pop italo etc that’s a lot of fun.

link please!

https://open.spotify.com/user/5tarm6gcravhfxbmnrol33dtj/playlist/2jbJv2NaLKNdgIDM92srr1?si=L93EG69UQSifQ0DqepDTeg

nice, thanks

That’s great

New solo Morgan Geist record, Duper. https://www.phonicarecords.com/product/morgan-geist-duper-pre-order-environ/183766

It's "super".

Great news, samples sound delicious.

It's really good. He's always good obviously, and the A side here is great, but the B side I really love, I always like it when he stretches out and does something a bit more different.