Reclaiming Soundsystem Culture: A Conversation with MORPH
Ever since its inception in 2024, MORPH Sound System has been contributing to an accessible and inclusive future for Montréal’s electronic music scene. MORPH is a femme and queer-run sound system that aims to give marginalized groups access and agency over musical spaces that have been historically closed off to them. Through workshops, performances, and events, they want to demystify the process of building speakers and running a sound system.
On October 11th, MORPH is hosting a fundraiser at Parquette to ensure they can continue to offer their workshops and services at an affordable price. The day will start with talks about sound system culture and speaker-building workshops, and it will transition into an array of DJ and live sets from some of the most promising underground talents in Montréal.
Last week I had a chat with Honeydrip, the founder of MORPH and one of its leading members. During our conversation, we spoke about the origins of the project, her hopes for the upcoming fundraiser, and a sound system’s potential to be a vital community space.
If you’re interested in hearing what MORPH is all about firsthand, click the link below to get your tickets for the event on Saturday October 11th!
https://www.zeffy.com/en-CA/ticketing/morph
Hey Tiana, hope you’re doing well. To begin, could you explain what MORPH is and what some of its main goals are as an organization?
Essentially, MORPH is for women and LGBTQ+ folks who want to enter sound system culture, which originally in its roots has been very male-centric. We want to equip these people with the skills to reclaim technical spaces.
Within the functions of a sound system, I feel like there’s so many elements that are artistic, technical, or crafty. There’s space for every single person to find a nook within the culture that interests them, which is great. Some people might be into the woodworking part, while others are mainly interested in the aesthetics of the sound system, and you could also focus on the actual soldering of crossovers and learning about the physics of it all. So we’re trying to sustain a diverse community of people where we all work together to create something new.
I’m curious about how MORPH first started. Were there certain moments that strongly inspired you to make the leap, or was it more of a gradual thing that had been on your mind for a while?
A few years ago, I was applying for my first grant and I was thinking of some sort of massive project that I could do. I decided I wanted to build a sound system because I was really attracted to the community based aspects of sound system culture, the spirituality aspects of sound system culture, and the music itself, of course. That project sort of planted the seeds for MORPH.
The real catalyst for MORPH specifically was when my speakers broke. I had my two subwoofers with me for almost a year, then there was an accident that happened and they got really busted up. At first, I was really upset and felt like I had to fix things all by myself, but then I changed my perspective and realized I wasn’t being intentional enough about trying to create community.
So I randomly made a post on Instagram in November 2024 where I floated the idea of fixing my speakers while also teaching people about them at the same time through a little workshop or something like that. And to my surprise, the post kind of blew up! It got a lot of traction and I was like, “Oh shit”, because people thought I was going to put together a real official workshop, not just the small one I had in mind. So I threw together a concept for a sound system conference at la Société des arts technologiques and over 100 people showed up. And at the end of the conference, I asked people to send me a message if they wanted to join a collective.
From there, 20 people came to the first meeting in January 2025 and now there’s a group of 10 of us that have been around since the start. So many collectives are formed by groups of friends that are chatting one night and then they’re like, “We should do this together.” MORPH has that natural aspect in a different way: We were a group of strangers that came together and formed our collective during that first event.