SATURDAY 29 MARCH 2025, 5PM
ENTRY BY KOHA
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Sumer welcomes renowned Koputai Port Chalmers-based musician and artist Michael Morley back to Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, to perform a special one-off acoustic set as The Never Quartet. A gallery artist, Morley has previously mounted two solo exhibitions of his paintings with Sumer, yet this will be his first time performing at gallery.
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Morley’s The Never Quartet consists of four guitars laid out in pairs atop heavy wooden tables. The strings, activated by electronic bows, establish four continuous chords that, together, make up an all-enveloping drone.
Far from remaining neutral supports, the tables amplify and alter the sound, filling the space to create an environmental installation. Morley modifies the chords by placing small wooden blocks, stacks of coins, and/or other items atop the guitars’ sounding bodies, occasionally adding, subtracting, or rearranging them throughout the performance. Morley’s motions seem more like building a model than playing an instrument in any conventional, or even unconventional, manner.
Devoid of a standard quartet’s four performers, Morley’s “never” ensemble approaches the condition of sculpture, albeit an interactive one, as audiences are encouraged to record and play back the sound on their mobile devices.
The Never Quartet exemplifies the peripatetic existence that allies musician and modernist sculpture, even while embracing and incorporating the contingencies of each realisation. Although the four guitars drone similarly irregardless of place, the arrangements of the blocks and coins, vagaries of the surrounding environments, and qualities of the appropriated furniture inflect the sound differently. Some of the most noteworthy, even startling aspects of the project’s recordings reside in the acoustical traces of such contingencies, as Morley retains the scrapes and thumps of the shifting blocks and coins.
—Branden W. Joseph
