It was over a year ago in December 2012 that Morgan Delt released his self-produced tape Psychic Death Hole and invented the label Inflatable Tapes to conceivably legitimize his eponymous debut. It was, being that it is now sold-out, a six-track double-sided spool of swirling and dripping psychedelic madness. Pop by nature, transcendent in execution, cathartic and beautifully exhausting in practice. Sometime last year but after May, a certain gung-ho weirdo who — after listening to Delt (by suggestion of the New Zealand blog The Active Listener)—decided to care for this man’s creation “upon first listen.”
“From the very first song ‘Make My Grey Brain Green’…from that very first 45 seconds of Psychic Death Hole, it sort of takes you on this weird journey,” relays Mr. Bill Roe of Trouble In Mind Records chuckling, “…from that moment, the first time I heard it…I knew I had to work with him.”
For Roe, who runs Trouble In Mind out of Chicago, Ill. with his wife Lisa, Delt’s sound is indicative of the 21st century mindset where the generational folds have collapsed in on themselves. An all encompassing array of a half-century of generational buzz. Techniques past and present are all in style and the contemporary here is merely one who could certainly get lost in that timeless, generational ambiguity. A talent who fits nicely into Trouble In Mind’s latest class of variegated paisley baroque authors: Maston, Jacco Gardner, and Doug Tuttle.
“I’d rather have a three minute song that changes into four different things than to have a ten minute song that never changes,” says Delt. “I dig that kind of stuff and will listen to it sometimes, but I personally gravitate toward over-the-top baroque and the ‘everything’s crammed in at once’ approach.”
Delt records everything on his own using Ableton which he then processes through a tape machine to get that underlying warble. His almost symphonic sprawls of instrumentation lend themselves to his fickle-minded history as a musician.
“When I was a kid I did all kinds of stuff. My parents had me taking all kinds of lessons—piano, stuff like that,” he says. “In school I started playing saxophone and getting into jazz and stuff for a while. Then I probably started playing guitar when I was ten. Then I got into recording when I was a teenager.” He goes on, “I was never really on any one thing. I kind of always jumped around, did a whole bunch of different things — tried to play a lot of different instruments.”
He's been producing his own music for years, only to take it down — offline — following discouragement from lack of acknowledgement. He’s currently working on a lineup to bring his psychic death hole concoctions into the live setting, but he's a particular person with meticulous material.
“I want to play live but I’m also a perfectionist control freak. I get discouraged sometimes like, ‘You’re not good enough!’” Delt admits. “I have played a bunch of times with some people and gone through some lineup changes. But even on my own I keep realizing I’ve got a lot of work to do by myself. Because there’s a lot of stuff where I just record something once and I don’t remember what I did or how to play it — there’s a lot of things where there’s two or three guitar parts so I’ve got to figure out how to arrange that down into one guitar part I can play while I sing.”
Translating a complex variety of music like Delt’s is no easy task, and once it’s ready how is going to look? With nothing scheduled nor a set backing band maybe we’re months from hearing Delt’s kaleidoscopic acid pop in-person. Roe’s contribution goes as far as releasing records for Delt, so maybe it’s up to the next gung-ho weirdo to concoct a tour or a one-off melty matinee featuring a sonic and visual performance nothing short of a Hawkwind show helmed by a 6-foot-2 Stacia bathing in the projections of a lunatic. From: https://imposemagazine.com/features/morgan-delt-interview
