“IT’S EASY TO MISTAKE TECHNOLOGY FOR MAGIC”: AFROMERM ON SOUND, DISPLACEMENT, & THE SOUTH LONDON SCENE

Cecilia Morgan performs as afromerm at Rearrange, Displace, Replace: Sound and Performance Night this Thursday 28th at Avalon Café, SE14, as part of Minor Attractions’ Summer Sessions alongside Yuri Umemoto (with Eliott Bougant on violin and Ozgur Kaya on cello), Kenichi Iwasa, Miles Scharff, and snake_case.

I arrive apologising to my interview with Cecilia Morgan, better known as sound artist afromerm, delayed by the trains that in London reliably fail the moment the temperature nudges past twenty degrees. We laugh about national unpreparedness ("we're prepared for a perpetual spring" she says), and within a few minutes I have stopped feeling guilty about it and we are chatting about her practice - and her upcoming performance at Summer Sessions' sound and performance night, which promises, in her own words, to make people feel whatever they feel.

The name afromerm has been circulating in South London's experimental music scene for a couple of years, though Morgan has been making music for considerably longer. She is a sound artist and composer, the second term deployed with some deliberation. "I think it's such a weighty term," she says. "There's so much it could mean." What it means in her case is something closer to sculpture than to the additive layering most producers are taught: she begins with an abundance of material and chisels.

"The traditional way you're taught to produce is additive," she explains. "Start with a loop, add another loop. But I often end up approaching my compositions quite subtractively. I'll bring in loads and loads of material and start chiselling away at it to create some sort of form." She traces this approach to fine art. As a child, Morgan was drawn to drawing and painting; classical training gave her technique and a love of repertoire, but the rigidity of traditional notation resisted her. Electronic music, discovered in her mid-teens, offered something more congruent with how she already thought.

"Coming to sound with that approach felt really freeing. That's what brought me to the title sound artist."

The result is a practice built around what she calls a finite palette. On stage, Morgan works with field recordings (sounds gathered on soundwalks, a concept attributed to Canadian composer Hildegard Westerkamp and described as walks whose main purpose is to connect with and listen to your environment), alongside crickets, crinkly textures that provide a high-end fizz, voice, synth, and snap. The palette is deliberately narrow. "I work with my voice, which is quite mid-heavy," she says, "and there's a risk of it becoming a big wash if I don't inject that kind of ASMR-y crinkle." The logic, she suggests, is almost toy-like: a finite set of blocks assembled into endlessly different configurations.

Photography courtesy of Isabella Ayala

Central to how those configurations take shape live is Juniper, a performance tool Morgan built for her undergrad thesis on embodiment in electronic music. Juniper allows her to move sound with her hands on stage, changing EQ and shaping texture, so that a single gesture can turn a field recording of water into a controlled trickle, or something that sounds like something else entirely. "The result is quite mystical," she says. "There's not a lot of public understanding about electronics and technology, so it's easy to mistake technology for magic." Over time, her work has drawn increasingly towards themes of mythology and ecology, and though Juniper preceded that shift, she observes that the two have grown towards each other. Almost like a shamanistic convergence, she agrees.

Performance for Morgan is structured improvisation, broad architecture with controlled spontaneity contained within it. She has been developing the current core afromerm body of work for just over a year and keeps it alive by introducing small variations in the days before each show. "I'm often quite busy on stage, turning knobs and moving my hands a lot," she says. "Just creating a slightly new gesture within the routine adds a bit of spontaneity on my part." The set has a framework; what breathes life into the gaps changes each time.

This Thursday May 27, that practice arrives at Avalon Café in Bermondsey for Rearrange, Displace, Replace: Sound and Performance Night, part of Summer Sessions. The title maps well onto the work, particularly the concept of displacement. "Field recording is displacement," she says. "You're removing sounds from the context of their source. That's called causal listening, where you hear something and decipher where it comes from. Placing it in an entirely new context allows for deep listening in the audience, where they recognise what it is but hear it as part of a symphony rather than just for what its purpose is." Rearrangement, too, is compositional - she works by bringing elements in and taking them out, treating the set as a reconfiguration of her selections into new forms. The constraint is the condition, and the variations are inexhaustible.

Asked what audiences can expect, she resists the immediately prescriptive. "I'm wary of calling it meditative, even though that's often the response it creates in an audience, but I never want to make that claim," she says.

"I'm very aware that once it's out there, everyone has a different internal reaction to something. I want people to come with an open mind and feel whatever they feel." 

Morgan is a South Londoner and direct about the debt she feels to the scene that formed her. She grew up with access to music education in London schools during the 2000s and 2010s, then spent the years after school immersed in the South London jazz scene as a consumer, a jammer, a participator rather than as a practising jazz musician. That scene, she notes, was built by Black British communities, and the gratitude is plain. "I really feel like it gave me a lot."

Photography courtesy of Grace Morgan

For current listening she returns repeatedly to Shabaka's Afrikan Culture and Sofie Birch and Antonina Nowacka's Hiraeth and has recently been spending time with Josiah Steinbrick's Meeting of Waters, a minimalistic synthesiser and percussion album a friend introduced her to. Both, she says, bring her calm and curiosity: two states that, in the work of afromerm, turn out to be far from mutually exclusive.

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afromerm performs at Rearrange, Displace, Replace: Sound and Performance Night, Thursday 28 May, 18:00–22:00, Avalon Café, Juno Way, SE14 5RZ alongside Yuri Umemoto (with Eliott Bougant on violin and Ozgur Kaya on cello), Kenichi Iwasa, Miles Scharff, and snake_case. Tickets available here.