Gate - Biography
Twenty years is long enough: It's time to acknowledge Michael Morley as an indie-rock patriarch.
And why not? As the guitarist and vocalist for New Zealand noise-trip trio The Dead C and the man behind Gate (ostensibly a solo project, although there are frequent guest appearances) Morley is the rare artist that record-hounds love to unearth: an isotope in the body Pop, radiating an invisible influence. With scores of micro-batch releases and an unmistakably intimate performance idiom, he ranks in the company of Jandek or Loren Connors, but it's Morley's geographic isolation rather than social disengagement that has deflected his work from reaching more ears. He tends his shambling craft in antipodean exile, in the remotest corner of the verdant backside of our increasingly Hollywood Planet, and his international live appearances are less common than eclipses. Still, if you don't recognize his name, you've heard his reverberations, in the ambient post-rock of Flying Saucer Attack and Labradford, the neo-psychedelia of Bardo Pond, and the fidelity-challenged whorl of Pavement and Sebadoh.
Morley is also, unfortunately, one of those artists whose discography is as dense as granite yet completely elusive, a la The Hafler Trio, et cetera. He has self-published dozens and dozens of releases, many on limited-edition, lathe-cut vinyl from notorious King Records in rural Ashburton, New Zealand. That’s preposterously limited editions, e.g., 10, 20, 30. (King Records is run by Peter King, who really does cut records one at a time, in real time, on a record lathe. I like to imagine that the lathe sits on his front porch, runs on gasoline, and has a two-stroke engine and a pull start, like a lawnmower.) Seriously, you’ll have better luck stumbling across Brigadoon than finding most Gate CDs, much less the vinyl. But we can take a swing at a few of the reasonably available highlights.
Recorded in 1993 and out of print since, Gate's The Dew Line (1993 Table of the Elements) is the first part of his "rock trilogy" (followed by The Monolake in 1996 and The Wisher Table in 1999). Rock it does. Typical Gate/Dead C no-fi guitar subduction and Morley's locked-in-the-car-trunk vocals are prominent, but there's also a hefty amount of scraping synthesizer menace and paleozoic riffage. The crust of noise is there, but crack open the sonic geode and you'll discover some nifty songstyling. In someone else's universe, the gem of an opening track, "Millions", gets play on AM radio, while "Have Not" climbs the FM charts. Full of brooding atmospherics, The Dew Line is the most — dare I say it — accessible of any of Morley's records, and it stands on an equal footing with his Dead C high-water mark, Harsh 70s Reality, as an anti-rock rock classic.
Admittedly, The Dew Line is song-based, and not altogether typical Gate; think of it as his Goth record. Like, say, Disintegration. More indicative is the CD, Live In Boston, NYC 1994 (1995 Poon Village). It was recorded on Gate’s 1994 US tour (his only to date) with Thurston Moore and Keiji Haino, on the leg right before Faust joined the bill. (Yes, Faust, Gate, Keiji Haino, and Thurston Moore, on one bill.) Lee Ranaldo (who has recorded at length with Morley, although most of it remains unreleased) joins for the first half. It’s a thirty-minute improvisation; both guitarists stack up feedback, loops, and drones, with plenty of growl and grit. The second half of the record features six vignettes with Morley and Ranaldo, plus electric harpist Zeena Parkins (it’s a testimony to her versatility that she can go back and forth between projects like this, and working with artists like Bjork). Together they lay down some solid electronic, improv shronk, with the always-awesome Parkins adding crucial fuel to the fire.
However, next to The Dew Line, neophytes are probably going to find The Monolake (1995 Table of the Elements) the easiest Gate record to handle. It’s a more conventional, song-based, “rock” effort. While it has plenty of lo-fi sonic gnashing, it was recorded during Morley’s time in the US, and touches of Americana are apparent, from the Death Valley imagery on the cover to the title (the body of water is “Mono Lake,” two words, and it’s in the California desert). Here he delves deeper into his opaque song stylings; The Monolake is road-trip across transcendental drones and detoured records.
The opening track, “Standing in Fields,” is a surprise, as it starts abruptly with some forceful, bluesy power chords, that repeat again and again throughout the length of the song. Recognize the swagger? It’s Keef. Keith Richards. Morley flat-out swipes the opening crunch of “Sway,” from Sticky Fingers, and makes it his own. He doesn’t keep the Stones chord that resolves the phrase, so the entire thing has a floating menace to it, and Morley really nails it when he adds his own riffs and solos. It’s solid stuff.
“To Kiss the Wall,” “The Hero Tree,” and “Sonora Purring,” are long-form tracks; less straightforward rock; more soundscapey, but still songs, with a variety of rawmill grinding, and some acoustic guitar added for good measure. However, the real gem is the closing track. Morley, having just traveled the US with Faust, gives them a shout-out by covering “Jennifer” from Faust IV. It’s an unbelievably heavy and thoroughly outstanding tribute, and when I say “cover,” I mean it literally. Meta-literally. He lays down the entire original Faust recording, then plays on top of it, adding guitar noise, vocals, solos, and the rest. It’s playful, creative, experimental, brazen, and it rocks — and that should be more than enough encouragement to start hunting for whatever you can find by Gate.
