Morrad + McArthur have made no secret of the fact that we embrace the vagaries, dislocations, glitches, and disruptions of the internet in our live and improvised distributed performances. We’ve likened the Internet to an unpredictable third member of “the band”. At times however the very mercurial nature of the signals generated by working online and remotely has been a source of frustration as much as inspiration.

In two recent long improvised recording sessions we’ve noted an equally unpredictable but more synergistically harmonious in our erstwhile non-human collaborator. So, for the September issue of Itinerant Mind our mix privileges the echo, noise and feedback generated by the flow of data itself somewhat more than we might normally do. The content is still fundamentally just us improvising with guitar and sax, but the feedback comes to the fore with some surprisingly beautiful yet dissonant moments emerging as fascinating sonic instants.

Annie Morrad and Ian McArthur live at opposite ends of the planet. They compose and play collaborative sound work and live performances through the use of digital software Mixlr and Skype. For live events McArthur broadcasts electronic sounds, field recordings and live mixing. Morrad plays live improvised alto and tenor saxophone against these. For their recorded sound work the starting points vary from being concept driven to "I've got this idea…."