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Echoes April CD of the Month: Morgan Doctor: Other Life
You can hear an audio version of the Echoes Blog, with Morgan Doctor’s music.
Morgan Doctor is one of those musicians who finds herself between worlds. The music on her new solo album, Other Life, is marked by imagery laden instrumental journeys colored with Indian instruments and ambient designs. If Morgan Doctor just wrote beautifully evocative instrumentals, that would be enough, but she also has three heart breaking vocal tunes with Tamara Williamson, who wrote and sang the lyrics.
Morgan Doctor: I’ve absolutely admired Tamara for her ability to write songs that are meaningful, a little esoteric that come from a deep place in our heart, and it’s funny because if you met her, she’s just really crass. She not really into anything spiritual at all but then she comes up with these very deep lyrics.
Morgan Doctor
Although this music has a serene quality to it, you’re more likely to find Morgan Doctor pounding a set of trap drums with a power pop trio called The Cliks. Big on the LGBT circuit with a transman lead singer, The Cliks, are exuberant, sassy and raw. Morgan Doctor’s own music is introspective, moody and tending toward the spiritual. She’s a world music percussionist who’s just as likely to play Indian tabla drums in a Kirtan session with Durga Das as mount the stage with The Cliks. But Other Life is more progressive than it is meditative. Odd time signatures and layered and textured arrangements make her compositions cinematic in scope. Her album is Other Life, and she creates other music, falling well between the cracks.
Morgan Doctor: it exemplifies this huge terrain of ground I like to dabble in which is world music which is trancey, sort of ambient, not traditional ambient music, but has that quality. As well as pop music, you know, singer-songwriter music. Yeah, so, I know surprisingly enough people are playing it for yoga class.
Her second solo album, Other Life, is a CD of transcendent ecstasy and subversive melody. It’s the Echoes CD of the Month for April. We’ll be featuring it next Monday, with an interview later in the month. You can also read a full review of the album. This has been an Echo Location, Soundings for New Music. You can hear Echo Locations every Wednesday at 9:35 AM on WXPN in Philadelphia (www.wxpn.org) For an audio taste of this blog and Morgan Doctor’s music, you can hear an audio version of this blog.
John Diliberto ((( echoes )))