Bio
Photos: Oyemi Hessou / T
Morgan Sully (US/DE) is a Berlin-based experimental musician descended from the great American portrait painter Thomas Sully, shaped by an itinerant life spanning the Pacific Ocean from Kalimantan/Borneo, Hawai’i and Southern California.
Morgan’s current practice moves between live electronics, curation, and the thoughtful resynthesis of his sonic heritage: cassette tapes of Sundanese degung and Malaysian pop are filtered through echoes of Autechre and Aphex Twin; footwork and jaipong mutations blessed by the Queen of Keroncong — Waldjinah — live alongside 90s rave mixtapes of desert techno, Chicago house and acid squelch.
Performing as Memeshift, his sets are dense, playful and feral: while The Wire called his debut album Echoes “a gently vaporous hulk of melancholia,” his live sets depart from his braided musical lineages, arriving somewhere between diasporic melayuncholia and archipelagic celebration.
Other work
His independent research practice is grounded in two closely held questions: how music travels and mutates across musical traditions, and how the tools we use to make music carry their own embedded assumptions and possibilities. These questions find their most developed expression in Latent Sonorities — a collaborative research project he initiated with musician and performing artist Bilawa Ade Respati, composer and researcher Khyam Allami, and Morphine Records’ Rabih Beaini, developed in partnership with Berlin’s Rumah Budaya Indonesia. The project produced a freely available sample pack and tuning files drawn from the Javanese gamelan instruments in RBI’s collection — tools designed to help producers work beyond the constraints of 12-tone equal temperament. Co-released with Yogyakarta’s Yes No Wave and accompanied by a live album, concert series, and contextual guide, Latent Sonorities was the subject of a feature interview with Ableton and has been taken up by musicians, researchers and students internationally.
His debut album Echoes (Chinabot, 2024) — described by The Wire as “a gently vaporous hulk of melancholia” — collapses decades and continents through field recordings, sampled cassettes, and DIY electronics, asking whether a coherent sense of home can be assembled from the fragments of a diasporic life.
Sully has performed at Cafe Oto, presented at CTM Festival and various other festivals and gatherings internationally. In 2021, with L-KW and Sōydivision, he co-developed Pasar Alkisah, an ambitious, 48-hour online festival in collaboration with Indonesian folk-doom metal band Senyawa featuring nearly 200 multimedia works from over 40 other music labels spanning 18 countries to co-release the band’s album Alkisah. The international project was featured in the New York Times, NME, Create Digital Music and more.
In 2022, he co-curated the long-running Soy&Synth series for improvisors across southerly, Global Majority diasporas. Soy&Synth is now past its 50th edition with an amazing new curatorial team co-curated by Irene Trejo, Eyal Vexler from AL.Berlin, Eiliyas from Black Communion, Ghaliz Fakhir Haris, Ariel William Orah and Pedro Oliveira.
He currently stewards L-KW, a Berlin-based label and release channel for collaborative and research-led music projects, often with Sōydivision, but not always.