Ron Morelli reveals Spit

Full details emerge on the L.I.E.S. head’s debut album on Hospital Productions.

As boss of New York’s L.I.E.S. label, Ron Morelli has been instrumental in shaping the current landscape of underground dance music, fostering an aesthetic that draws as much from noise, ambient and industrial music as it does from house and techno. Morelli is involved in a number of collaborative projects, including the Two Dogs In A House and L.I.E.S. endeavours with Steve Summers and Bad News with Doug Lee, though to date he has released only one solo record, which was Straightjacket, a highly limited L.I.E.S. BLK release under the name U-202.

News of his debut album first emerged earlier this month, and its mooted appearance on Dominick Fernow’s Hospital Productions came as a surprise to all, though the scorched industrial textures present on “Straitjacket” seemed to suggest that Morelli’s album would be in good company alongside Fernow’s Vatican Shadow and Prurient aliases on the respected noise imprint. Full details would seem to confirm that Morelli’s album will be of this nature, described by the label as containing “House and industrial tape experiments to saturated metallic beat tracks,” with Morelli saying in the accompanying press release that the LP “is about immediacy, pressure, monotony and stress”.

“A great deal of the feelings conveyed within come from the fear and repulsion of basic human interaction,” Morelli continues, “like if someone sitting behind you on the plane sneezes on you or being forced to shake the clammy hand of a stranger and the intimate paranoias of the mind and dealing with it or not. Not to make some deep intellectual fuck show of this, as it is not…it’s just stress music…jammed out quick and recorded.”

Supposedly the first of three planned releases from Morelli on Hospital Productions, the name behind the LP has just the kind of story you’d expect to come from the acerbic DJ and producer. “Last year, I was staying in an area where all the hookers did their work…all they would do is smoke cigarettes, read the paper, talk on their cell phones, and spit. They would spit…A LOT. I would step in that hooker spit on the way home, often tracking it into the apartment building as I entered. This is where the title of the record comes from.”

Hospital Productions will release Spit on CD, LP and digital formats on November 11.

Tracklisting:

1. Radar Version
2. Modern Paranoia
3. Crack Microbes
4. Sledghammer II
5. Fake Rush
6. Director Of…
7. No Real Reason
8. Slow Drown