Loscil: Visualizing Lake Fire

Operating under the alias Loscil, Scott Morgan has long been a fixture of contemporary ambient music. Since 2001, the Vancouver-based producer has honed a formula that assimilates deceptive complexity beneath a surface of billowing pads and textures.

The latest Loscil full-length for kranky, Lake Fire, is inspired by the impact of climate change on the North American West Coast. Work on the album began with Morgan capturing recordings from a salvaged guitar, eventually weaving in more synthesis than he typically incorporates. Once Lake Fire’s palette was established, Morgan stitched together nine cloudy arrangements. Experimentation with these fresh techniques cultivates a dense, noisy atmosphere. Like brush growing from charred dirt, Lake Fire draws thorniness from dulled timbres.

We recently caught up with Morgan to discuss his use of Max for Live; his on-stage A/V rig; and the methods that sparked Lake Fire’s sonic smog.

This new record is one of your darkest albums yet. It’s inspired by climate change and wildfires, and fittingly sounds pretty heavy and overcast. I’m curious how you used sound to convey that smokey feeling.

I’ve been chasing texture in music for pretty much my whole career. Density is a core element of electronic music that I’m drawn to. Similar to photography, I like those hazy, ill-defined soft edges. In this record, it’s mostly achieved from a lot of resampling and regurgitating stuff and stacking things up. A lot of chordal harmonic clusters end up getting resampled and layered. It’s really just a process of overdoing it and then chiseling back the sound a little bit. It’s almost like a remix record of my own material. As a result, it ends up being really cluttered and dense. But that helps evoke that feeling of being lost in the haze.

What techniques did you use to remix your own material?

Just resampling. A lot of this material goes back to late 2021. I had finished my full-length, Clara, and I was exploring new sounds. I had a residency, where I was spending a lot of time resampling a really old guitar that had broken that I had glued back together and wanted to salvage some last sounds out of. I was recording these sounds and putting them through granular processing and building up a library of content that I ended up not doing much with, initially.

Lawrence (English) interrupted the process and we ended up making a couple records together and touring for 2023 and 2024. I ended up coming back to a lot of that early material and designing a piece because Lawrence had invited me down to Australia to do a piece with a five-piece ensemble. I was building this bed of electronic sound that the ensemble would play over, based on this collection of sounds. All of that material ended up getting tossed and resampled. It was this weird, four year regurgitation process of resampling material and reprocessing it and relayering it that eventually ended up at Lake Fire.

How do you feel like this new record sits within the context of your discography as a whole? To me, it feels a little less serene and more moody.

I’d say it probably has the most catharsis of any record I’ve made under the Loscil name. That’s partly due to the inspiration of wildfires and the climate, but it’s also to do with reaching a point creatively of being disconnected from what I was working on — throwing it out, but not wanting to give up on it and redesigning it. Which is a natural part of the creative process, but for some reason, with this project, it felt necessary to destroy or abandon the work and rebuild it. In that sense, it ends up being quite cathartic and – not aggressive –  but certainly dark.

You have a pretty powerful visual presentation live. How do you use Ableton in that A/V experience?

I have a Push 3 that is hooked up to Ableton and I’m controlling audio. Then I have two channels in Ableton with a Max for Live patch that sends OSC from Ableton to a software called Resolume. Resolume is a VJ software. It’s set up very similarly to how Ableton works, but for video clips. I can trigger individual video clips; do opacity fades. Like, all kinds of controls from Ableton, using these Max for Live things that I’ve built. They’re really simple, but they just allow me to build a set of material where I can one hundred percent focus on controlling the audio and then the video just follows along with me.

Download Loscil’s free Max for Live devices for controlling Resolume

Requires Live 12 Suite and Resolume software

In your live show surrounding this record, how are you using those visuals to tie into themes of climate change?

I’m purposefully staying away from imagery of fire because I think it’s a bit traumatizing and that’s not my goal. I like to be poetic with sound and visuals, in the sense that this is not a lecture piece and it’s not a political piece of art, really.

Visually, the tie-ins are usually quite abstract. I like to incorporate natural footage that I take myself with my camera. I’m really drawn to simple geometric shapes, overlaid onto these natural images to provide a contrast. It’s something to structurally hang onto, in terms of linking to elements in the music. Quite often, I will time opacity shifts to the sound of the bass. I’m really interested in the filmic history of visual music and these ideas that have been explored from the film perspective since the turn of the 20th century. My visual work is a nod to experimental animation from the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. It has a feel that is not too futurist. It’s an old way of working, in terms of collage and layering things in simplistic ways that are very satisfying for me and connect to the music.

What films or directors are you excited by? Do you feel like your interest in visuals crosses over into your process as a producer or are they pretty separate for you?

They’re separate, but they’re cut from the same cloth. I dabble in photography and I’ve done a few photo zines released with accompanying music. I, quite often, will do one of those releases as a follow up to a main album. I’m actually working on my next photobook right now. There’s some tie ins with the photography to the video work — similar imagery.

In terms of inspiration, I’m very hooked on the post-war, modernist take on experimental film. There’s Jordan Belson or James Whitney or Norman McLaren. It was the heyday of experimental visual work that drifted into this visual music territory. It was very abstract, but very intentional. I love all that stuff and still find that a go-to for inspiration.

Going back to the new record, did you use any hardware or external sound sources? And did you control or process them in Ableton?

I have a Black Corporation Deckard’s Dream, which is all over the record. It’s a Japanese synthesizer that’s modeled after a Yamaha CS-80. It’s called the Deckard’s Dream because it’s like the synth that was used for the original Blade Runner by Vangelis. It’s a very specific sound, and is not typically a sound I would incorporate. It’s a boutique instrument and it’s kind of pricey. A friend of mine joked that it’s, like, “Oh, you just spent a bunch of money on a synthesizer and used it to try and imitate the Loscil sound.” It’s true that I spent a lot of time developing patches on the synth that basically end up sounding like everything else I’ve ever done, mostly using Ableton to further process the sound. Or a lot of modulation, whether it’s controlling the synth by using LFOs or modulating panning or modulating an EQ to give the synth sound a little extra movement and life.

The only two other hardware synths on the album are a Novation Peak and Moog Minitaur for the bass, which is pretty straightforward. It’s a two oscillator bass synth, and the Moog sound for bass is really great. It’s round and warm and big. I don’t do much post-processing, other than the Glue Compressor — an Ableton device that really sucks the sound together. When you throw a lot of bass into the mix and you put it all through the Glue compressor, it gives you that squashed sound that you can hear a lot on the opening track, “Arrhythmia.” You get that pulsing, almost dance music quality.

Are there any other Ableton devices or features you find yourself gravitating towards?

On Lake Fire, it was Granulator 2. But now there’s Granulator 3. I use that religiously, it’s such a great device. Obviously, all the nuts and bolts filters and EQs and LFOs. I use the arpeggiator quite a bit in Ableton.

Sampler is probably my desert island tool. I could build an entire record just from the Sampler and a microphone. It’s very simple, but also goes pretty deep and allows you to do modulation and sound design. It's a pretty important tool for a lot of what I do.

Are there any Ableton hacks you’ve picked up over the years?

I like to nest my instruments: group them and then trigger the chain, so when I’m playing live, I can switch between racks on the fly. It’s something I’ve become quite reliant on in the live context because it allows me to have only eight tracks. If I need to change instruments, I can just trigger a new chain. It’s a simple thing, but it’s become essential for how I perform live and move through a set.

You’ve been releasing music for well over 20 years now. Have you been using Ableton the whole time? If so, how has your process with the DAW evolved since you started?

My very first record was made with MIDI and external samplers and synths, that was Triple Point. The next three records, I had built my own sequencer in Max/MSP. I was a pretty hardcore Max user for a long time. It’s something I was exposed to in the ‘90s at University and kept working on. I had built a custom sequencer and performance tool that several of my records were built on.

Ableton got going at some point in there but I hadn’t really tuned into Live. Once Max for Live came along, a lot of what I was doing on my own seemed kind of unnecessary — building my own sequencers and stuff — because Live is so good at it. So I started to migrate to Ableton, and anything core to my Max work, I was able to port as Max for Live devices. I still think one of the most brilliant aspects of working in Ableton now is that you can either have your own custom Max for Live devices, or you can demo any of the billions of things out there created by other people. I’m so happy that Ableton acquired Cycling ‘74, not for corporate reasons, but for keeping that tech going. It’s quite essential to what I do and it’s really important to me.

Follow Loscil on his website, Bandcamp, and Instagram

Text and Interview: Ted Davis
Photos courtesy of Scott Morgan