“Around You Is A Forest“
Thomas Morgan’ debut album, Around You Is a Forest (Loveland Music), reveals a dimension of Morgan’s artistry long hidden from public view: his lifelong engagement with computers, programming, and hacker culture. The record is built around WOODS, a virtual string instrument Morgan designed in SuperCollider, an open-source software environment for real-time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. WOODS evokes the sound of plucked and struck string instruments — West African lute-harps, Asian zithers, the Hungarian cimbalom, marimbas — while operating according to generative code that Morgan shaped into a living, evolving instrument.
Each track features a duet between WOODS and one of today’s most inventive musicians: Dan Weiss (tabla), Craig Taborn (keyboards, field recordings), Gerald Cleaver (drums), Henry Threadgill (flutes), Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpet), Bill Frisell (guitars), Immanuel Wilkins (alto saxophone), and Gary Snyder (voice). Morgan’s early experiences with programming began in childhood in Hayward, California. His father, a computer science professor, introduced him to games like Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? and Myst — and then taught him how to look under the hood. “When I asked him, he showed me how to edit a SimCity file in hexadecimal to increase city funds,” Morgan recalls. “Understanding how things were actually working opened up another world altogether.”
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By high school, he was writing code and experimenting with Unix systems. He was drawn to the flexibility of open-source environments and the curiosity-driven ethos of the free software movement. At the same time, he was falling in love with jazz, captivated by the playing of Ray Brown and the community of improvisers who embraced freedom, structure, and listening. The two worlds never felt far apart. “Jazz musicians are music hackers,” he says. “Both are about curiosity, about discovering something in the moment and applying it immediately.”
While Morgan doesn’t typically identify as a programmer, he describes occasional deep dives into creative coding — episodes of sustained exploration that mirror his approach to music. “Most of the time what I do is tinkering,” he says. “But sometimes, like with this project, I’ll disappear into it for weeks or months.
The album’s title comes from both a classic text adventure game (Adventure) and a metaphor for artistic community. “A forest is a place where nutrients and information are shared through root systems,” Morgan says. “In that sense, the musicians on this album are some of the trees that teach and nourish me.”
The metaphor also captures the nature of WOODS itself. Its sonic palette is cohesive, like the repeating forms of bark and leaves, yet within that texture lies constant variation: shifting rhythmic emphases, subtle changes in timbre, and evolving harmonies. Against this backdrop, Morgan’s collaborators bring their own voices into the environment, improvising in dialogue with a living ecosystem.
The album’s artwork deepens this concept. Created by Tal R, a leading visual artist in Denmark, the visuals reflect the interconnected spirit of the music. The word ASSEMBLY, rendered in a mechanistic, all-caps lettering, evokes both assembly-language coding and the intricate structure of a digital instrument. Meanwhile, the mirrored trees on the cover — some of which resemble jet planes — echo the forest metaphor and invoke the layered elegance of Monk or Motian.
For an artist known for his subtlety and self-effacement, Around You is a strikingly personal statement. It brings to light a creative life long lived in parallel to Morgan’s role as a bassist. The album also marks a new chapter in Morgan’s ongoing collaborative relationship with Jakob Bro, whose label, Loveland Music, is releasing the album on 2LP/CD/digital.
Morgan sees the album not as a departure from his identity as a bassist, but as an expansion of it. Around You Is a Forest affirms that code and sound, structure and spontaneity, can coexist — and that improvisation, whether in music or programming, remains one of the most powerful tools for discovery we have.