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  Morgan Packard - Airships Fill the SkyBy Daniel JohnsonJul 19, 2007 It's nearly impossible to talk about electronica without using the names of its sub-genres. Nothing has been as categorized and cross-categorized - trance, techno, glitch, etc. - as machine-based music and new labels seem to hatch daily like tiny digital insects. To add to the confusion, the software has gotten so powerful, and so user-friendly, that the threshold to making passable-sounding tracks is lower than in any other discipline. The result is a glut of releases that can make finding true brilliance fatiguing. So it's out of necessity, not unfairness, to judge any new electronic artist by a higher standard of innovation and craft. In theory, Morgan Packard's solo debut Airships Fill the Sky, with its inclusion of cello, sax and accordion, falls somewhere in the family of "folktronica," a melding of digital techniques and acoustic sounds, with an emphasis on their rougher textures. Its definitive statement was probably Four Tet's 2002 masterpiece Rounds (though lesser-known Minotaur Shock refined the sound with the subtler, majestic Maritime). But despite its acoustic ingredients, most of Airships exists in an aural tundra of glossy, airtight ambience, as if Packard excised, or forgot to leave in, any of the scraping, creaking textural friction that gives acoustic-electro its yin and yang. Working with self-made software, Packard obviously owns his process; there is a confidence in Airships' sculpting that belies a mastery of the tools. But of course machine-based music works best when it's humanized - in other words, it needs composition, not just technique - and even Autechre, who wrote the book on beautifully empty techno, eventually abandoned their icily static arrangements for more sprawling asymmetry. Airships comes packaged with the Unsimulatable DVD, Packard's collaboration with Joshue Ott that uses more homemade software to draw images that react to the music in a self-perpetuating way, along the lines of Brian Eno's generative music. Unfortunately, the two-toned animations are less dynamic than the stock graphic function in Windows Media Player. A DVD exploring the process itself would have been more interesting. Eno, one of minimalism's great ambassadors, always tried to inject the illusive quality of humanity into his formative experiments; after all, through randomness he was seeking an analog to life itself. For ambient techno, Airships is austere enough to be a quality addition to the catalog, but with so much already said on the subject, Packard would be better served using his talent for the technical in the pursuit of a more engaging humanism.
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