Poly-Polyphonies & Psychedelia: The Charles Morogiello ‘Crush Depth’ Interview
For Charles Morogiello, the mastermind behind Spacefuzz, the new double LP ‘Crush Depth’ was kind of a survival mechanism.
Conceived during the pandemic when his life “turned into a horror movie from another dimension,” Morogiello built this “Dub-Sonic Submarine Symphony” as a “safe harbor from my waking and walking nightmare.” The album is a deep dive into “poly-polyphonies” and psychedelic textures, where “curiosity is the unifying concept.” Morogiello balances high-concept composition with “child-like” play, treating the studio as a “safety bubble, my submarine” to neutralize the acidity of the outside world. More than just music, ‘Crush Depth’ is designed as a physical “concept album” limited to 500 copies. As Morogiello explains, “I don’t create downloads, I create artifacts that provide emotional experiences.” From intense layered guitars to the “happy accidents” of his pug Marty barking, the album is a “sonic toybox” that proves art can be the ultimate lifeboat.
“I don’t create downloads, I create artifacts that provide emotional experiences.”
‘Crush Depth’ feels like a deep dive into some pretty intense stuff you were going through. When you first started cooking up this “Dub-Sonic Submarine Symphony,” were you consciously building a sonic liferaft, or did the music just kind of… become the lifeboat you didn’t even know you were building?
Charles Morogiello: That is a great question. ‘Crush Depth’ and its predecessor ‘Increvable!’ were both created during an extremely intense period in my life at the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic mindfuck. Literally overnight, my life turned into a horror movie from another dimension. I was lost, alone and living in the space between fear and death on a breath-to-breath basis. As I began to sort stuff out and move forward, I turned to creativity to escape. ‘Crush Depth’ gave me safe harbor from my waking and walking nightmare.
I did not plan my life this way, it was pure survival. I found comfort in the work – constructing multi-layered drum beats, repairing broken keys on a Wurlitzer 120, getting lost for hours in Moog sequences, finding new tones and techniques on the electric guitar, woodshedding 360-degree stereo mixing techniques and developing the underwater dub-scape soundworld. Creation was my safety bubble, my submarine. Climbing into art-mode neutralized the acidity I was flooded with.
You’ve hung out in some seriously brainy musical halls, studying with folks like Mel Powell and Mort Subotnick. But then Spacefuzz comes along, throwing down these wild, “poly-polyphonies” and super emotional soundscapes. How does all that high-brow academic stuff play nice, or maybe even playfully mess with, the raw, psychedelic madness of Spacefuzz? Is it like a constant conversation between your head and your gut when you’re creating?
I was playing improvisational avant-jazz and psychedelic rock before I went to study with the masters, but I studied classical music before I became a devotee to the power chord and delay-drenched wah-wah squeals. It’s all a big circle.
My mentor Mel Powell’s story was somewhat similar. Mel played classical piano as a kid, then got into jazz. He worked with Glenn Miller, Billie Holiday and Benny Goodman before heading into academia via studies with Paul Hindemith at Yale. When I studied with him, Mel had just won the Pulitzer Prize and was creating very dense and challenging atonal music for traditional orchestral instruments. My studies with Mel groomed my abstract tendencies by instilling in them gestural intention and solid architectural frameworks.
Morton Subotnick was (and still is!) an electro-acoustic pioneer who imbued so much of his work with metaphor and storytelling. Every project of Mort’s is a concept album. He also has a great sense of how to create sonic drama through balancing density, space, tone and texture. I’ve definitely brought those concepts into my work as well.
Another important influence is my record collection. One of the first albums I purchased with my own savings was The Beatles aka “the white album”. It was 1975 and I was six years old. I loved every single moment of it. From the rockers to the soundscapes and every peculiar sound in between. I spun the vinyl forwards and backwards on my toy General Electric record player. You can surely imagine how listening to all four crazy sides of that album perverted my young sonic mind.
“Curiosity is the unifying concept.”
From the crazy thrash-bop of ‘Kiss The Frog’ to the epic symphonic vibe of ‘Crush Depth,’ your musical journey looks less like a straight line and more like a tangled, awesome root system. What’s the secret sauce that connects all these seemingly different musical adventures? And what core creative itch has kept you going for thirty years in experimental electronic music?
Curiosity is the unifying concept. ‘Kiss The Frog’ and the ‘Spacefuzz’ compositions are vehicles to explore the concepts that arise from the time I spend engaging with my imagination. Play – in the child-like sense – is an integral part of my creative process. By giving yourself time to freely wonder, create, ideate, plan, spitball and improvise without pressure or judgement gives me the freedom to explore without fear. Often the experiments that arise from creative play become seeds or components of a creative project. The track ‘Interrogation’ on ‘Crush Depth’ is one of those. I spent some time doing creative studies to learn about how sonar works underwater and was truly amazed at how much detail can be gleaned by reflecting sound waves off of another object. ‘Interrogation’ is an underwater sonic landscape full of large and small objects, moving through stereo space, with locations being reported back to “base” by sonar pingbacks.
I’m a composer who works in many forms… scoring music on paper, recording deeply layered electronic music and improvising ambient/jazz/metal with ‘Kiss The Frog.’ Plus there is the visual aspect of it – album artwork, photography, labels, promotional items. These are all pieces to the greater puzzle and all have a reason for being included. I don’t create downloads, I create artifacts that provide emotional experiences. Yes, listeners can stream my albums, but unless you’re getting the album with the artwork, photography, liner notes, labels and reading deadwax inscriptions you are only getting a small piece of the artistic intent.
My art/music is nothing like Frank Zappa’s but he is definitely a close relative to what I do. He called his work a “project/object” wherein every molecule of information could be attached to a thread [that] was woven into the totality of his work. I wear a lot of hats, but don each of them at the service of exploring a creative idea. Right now, I’ve got an old Echoplex EP-1 tape delay unit on my desk. It doesn’t work and I don’t know why. The tubes might not work, the drive belt may be worn out, there may be some capacitors leaking, the pinch roller looks dried and pear-shaped, the capstan is wiggling and the tape is shedding oxide all over the tape heads. I’m not an electronics engineer, but I’m elbows deep repairing it because I KNOW – this device is going to be one of the key sound ingredients for the next Spacefuzz album. At the current moment, my curiosity and creative drive has driven me to be an Echoplex repairman.
Brian Wilson’s multi-layered sound and his honest lyrics about mental health really lit a fire under you for ‘Crush Depth.’ Can you point to a specific moment or a track on the album where you hear that Brian magic, but it’s totally gone Spacefuzz – like a “counterpoint of counterpoints” that just screams your inner battles?
There are a lot of them.
I think the opening track ‘Crush Depth’ – which is essentially an overture that foreshadows everything that happens later in the album – encapsulates the poly-polyphony idea. On one level it’s a happy pop song about getting on a boat and going on a trip but – spoiler alert – a trap door opens and the contents of the ‘Crush Depth’ sonic toybox spills out onto the floor. The first of ‘Crush Depth’s’ poly-polyphonies percolates and layers up – a musique-concrète drum beat, spliced into a gang of contrapuntal thumb pianos, adding a quartet of melodic guitars, then a call & response between a theremin and other electronic gurglings, then another layer of guitar melodies topped by and two more simultaneous guitar solos. The track is only 4 and half minutes long.
‘Deepwater Pursuit (Part 2)’ is the dramatic apex of the album and it features the most intense layering of polyphonies anywhere on the album. It took a great deal of finesse to mix this track in ways to give aural access to the inner voices while building kinetic intent required to push the track forward dramatically. I feel like this definitely succeeded. The listener should feel completely exhausted and drained by the end of the track. I chose to add 25 seconds of silence before the final epilogue track “Shot Through The Heart and Shot Through The Head” begins so listeners could recover from the sonic drama.
‘Surveillance’ probably should be mentioned as well. The track takes up the entirety of side iii, and at various times features vocal hocketing, five drumset parts, multiple modular synthesizer pulses, a dozen guitars, multiple guitar atmospheres/loops/drones, a Terry Riley-styled analog keyboard loop jam bubbling over a huge pulsing Neu! beat that sounds like 50 metal trashcans cascading down an elevator shaft (in dub).
So, your pug, Marty, apparently lays down some “improvised background vocals” on all your albums. Seriously, how does having an unpredictable, furry little co-pilot in the studio, or just any random element, fit into your super-detailed way of composing? Do you intentionally leave room for happy accidents in your grand musical schemes?
I’m so glad you mentioned Marty. He is ever present by my side in the studio. He sleeps on a pillow right beneath my Wurlitzer 120 electric piano. He seems to magically know when a track needs some of his input. It’s uncanny – he truly is my bandmate. The music world needs more dogs barking into harmonizers that are fed into a Leslie speaker and mixed in a wide stereo ping-pong spread. Thank you Pink Floyd. I rejoice at the happy accidents and gladly welcome them to my music.
I’ve studied a great deal of John Cage’s music, read his books and even performed 4’33” in a recital. Environmental awareness is a component of music making. Not only Marty’s snoring and barks, but other sounds as well – scratchy volume pots (“A Coloured Dream”), broken guitar capo (‘Shot Through The Heart And Shot Through The Head’), muscle cars racing outside of my studio (‘Deepwater Pursuit (Part 2)’).
Jesse Jarnow says ‘Crush Depth’ is this deep, personal story wrapped up in a “majestic, playful sweep.” Given how much emotional heavy lifting you did, where does that “playful sweep” even come from? Is it like a necessary break from the intensity, or is it just part of the whole wild ride you’re taking us on?
The joyousness found on ‘Crush Depth’ is a direct result of the healing process I went through. I found gratitude, joy, and self-care. The previous album – ‘Increvable!’ – is the horror movie. ‘Crush Depth’ is the thrilling adventure. Life became more enjoyable as the dumpster fire moved further into life’s rear view mirror. I had a lot of time to reflect and learn how I wanted to live my life moving forward. I became a human again. The crippling fear, anxiety and social phobias that I had been living with forever, slowly fell away through therapy. Little by little, I learned how to make friends and trust people. I started to have crushes and have mature emotional relationships. I found strength in vulnerability and joy in helping others suffering through traumatic experiences and mental health challenges know they weren’t alone and that therapy works once you surrender and follow doctors orders. This isn’t all puppy dogs and petunias – recovery from mental health trauma isn’t a straight line. There are zigs and zags with ups and downs, but having a great toolset helped me navigate each and every test of my personal crush depth. Recovery removed the fear, self-doubt and worry from my art-making, enabling me to truly express the full spectrum of emotions, not just fear, loneliness, anger and hurt.
You’ve done the whole NYC-to-LA-to-Phoenix thing. Does moving around, the very vibe of a place, secretly (or not-so-secretly) mess with the kind of sounds you make? How has Phoenix, especially, put its stamp on “The Blue Room” where you brewed up “Crush Depth”?
I’ve been wondering if the whole legend of the Phoenix was created just for my version of the simulation. In the fable, a Phoenix lives for multiple centuries and before expiration, it would build a nest, then set it on fire. The new Phoenix would rise from the ashes and the process would repeat. I moved to Phoenix in 2017, set up a nest that was eventually (metaphorically) set ablaze and I rose from the ashes as a completely new person. Did I have to move to Phoenix for this to happen or did this happen because I was in Phoenix? Was this fable created just so I would understand what I was going to have to go through later in life – and where it would happen? Creepy.
Arizona is a beautiful, bizarre and misunderstood place. Yeah, it’s hot. Summer here is like winter most everywhere else – everybody generally stays inside because it is 115 degrees outside. We have huge desert dust storms that blanked the city followed by violent monsoon rainstorms that last about 20 minutes. Then the sun comes out and it is beautiful. Phoenix is the 5th largest city in the United States by population and growing. Much like Los Angeles it is a horizontal, not vertical, sprawl. It looks like what the surface of Mars will be when humans arrive and bring strip malls and housing tracts.
Weird shit grows in the desert. Peyote cacti grow here. The toad from which DMT is extracted lives here. The Meat Puppets, Waylon Jennings, Glen Campbell and Alice Cooper are from here.
In a world drowning in digital noise, ‘Crush Depth’ is dropping as a classic double LP, a proper concept album. What’s the deal with going all old-school with vinyl, flipping sides, and really committing to a “concept album” for such a personal piece of work? Is it your way of inviting us to really get in the submarine with you?
I think you’re on the right track with your questioning. While ‘Crush Depth’ has been released to digital streaming services, it was designed from stem to stern as a physical object that contains sound, art, design, photography, poetry and music. ‘Crush Depth’ as a vinyl artifact is akin to one of Andy Warhol’s hand-pulled screen prints of Campbell’s soup cans. He only pulled a certain number of each of those prints and each one is slightly different.
‘Crush Depth’ crams a modified version of symphonic form into the classic prog-rock 2LP archetype. There are only 500 copies of this record in existence. Each copy has a provenance that goes directly back to the artist who created it. I hand numbered every copy.
I prefer listening to music on vinyl. I think the sonic experience is better and the emotional experience is infinitely more impactful.
You’ve jammed and recorded with some absolute legends – from Frank Zappa’s Don Preston to Billy Martin. What’s the biggest ‘aha!’ moment or game-changer you picked up from playing with such a wild mix of musicians? And how do those experiences whisper (or shout) in the solo universe of Spacefuzz?
I’ve been lucky to have been accidentally placed in situations where I was able to create music with some real monsters. Meeting and collaborating with Don Preston was a life-long dream brought to reality by a friend who worked as one of Frank Zappa’s manuscript copyists. Billy Martin collaboration was also very random. At a friend’s urging I sent him some music that I made from sampling his drum beats. He emailed back and he gave some notes on the recording and we began to collaborate on further iterations of the piece via email. Eventually, he put out an album containing a number of these types of collaborative projects entitled ‘Drop The Needle.’ I flew out to NYC for the record release party and got to meet him in person. We discussed doing a further collaboration between MMW and Kiss The Frog (a double trio!) but it never came to be.
Probably one of the biggest “aha!” moments was when Mark Karan (guitarist for The Dead, The Other Ones and Ratdog) sat in with FOOD, the precursor band to ‘Kiss the Frog.’ We were playing ‘Thirty Five,’ a song whose title comes from its mathematical basis. Half of the band was playing in 5/4 and the other half of the band was playing in 7/4, which means the “one” only arrives every 35 beats. I counted it off “one two three four five!” and the band started grooving. Mark was playing along, trying to find his space in the stew, but didn’t know the secret to the groove. Seeing this, I leaned over to him and explained what was happening. He let out this big huge smile, started laughing then fired off a guitar solo that raised the roof. This aha moment was pretty profound to me… it kinda blew my mind that I was playing a song I wrote with a guy who essentially played in The Grateful Dead and his mind was displaced enough to be forced to dig in and find new mojo. The concept eluded him at first, but once he got the key, he unlocked the door and walked through infinity over that weird groove.
These experiences taught me to trust my curiosity and be willing to experiment. What seems bat shit crazy on the surface, can become magic when nurtured with love and faith. The track “The Unexplainable” contains three strata of mathematical grooves performed on three different drum machines – one in 5/4, one in 7/4 and one in 6/4… the end result sounds like a mutant Public Enemy groove, which I absolutely didn’t expect.
Now that you’ve totally owned this “personal crush depth” thing and come out the other side, what’s brewing for Spacefuzz next? Are there new sonic frontiers you’re itching to explore, or fresh stories just waiting to burst out in sound? What’s the next chapter for Charles Morogiello, the music wizard, and Charles Morogiello, the dude?
I’ve got tons of ideas and not enough time to complete them! First on the list is releasing a ‘Crush Depth’ interview I did with famed recording engineer Paul Hamingson. Paul has a huge discography including Ramones, Living Colour, Anthrax, Soul Asylum and many more. After that I’m going to make an animated video for the track ‘Crush Depth’ that will take what I learned about stop motion animation in the “HelloBee” video and crank it up a notch.
At the same time, I’m gathering instruments, sounds and structures for the next Spacefuzz album. I’m exploring how to apply mathematical ratios to sonic structure, somewhat similarly to how an automobile’s transmission works. The sonic engine will spin at the same tempo but will apply different gears ratios on top of the original tempo. So you’ll get two musics going at different speeds on top of each other, but somehow it will still sound like a solid groove – until I destroy it. As for me, the dude, my hope is to follow Gustave Flaubert’s advice: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” I prefer to live a simple life with few surprises, as it allows me to use the energy I would spend on crisis management to focus on making great challenging psychedelic music, baby.
Klemen Breznikar
Headline photo: Mark Morgan Photography.org
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