Memeshift

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.

Memeshift's sets are dense, playful and feral - often departing from his braided musical lineage, arriving somewhere between diasporic melayuncholia and archipelagic celebration.

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.

Their Resident Advisor profile, in full and unedited.