We recently connected with Matthew Morris and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Matthew, thanks for joining us today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?

If given the chance, I don’t believe that I would seek to have changed the point in my life in which I started along the career path of the creative. One’s art is a reflection of themselves, and it took into my 30s for me to be able to turn my experiences into meaningful pieces of art, despite always having an interest in music.

All the missteps, the blunders, successes, and failures have shaped me into the person typing this passage. If you can approach life with a growth mindset, you realize that every opportunity and decision you make is a chance to learn and grow. This can be applied to any facet of one’s life, be it in regards to a career, relationships, friendships, and business.

Throughout my life, I seem to have relied on the guidance of others to determine who I really am as a person. For example, I spent my entire time in college pursuing medicine simply because my parents and extended family always wanted me to be a doctor. It wasn’t, however, something that I wanted for myself.

Music has always been in my life, but it took a series of failures and self-realizations to understand exactly who I am, the legacy I choose to leave behind, and for what I want to be remembered. Every difficult job that led nowhere, every miscalculation, every setback, was a way for me to identify with myself and realize the path that lay ahead of me.

Finally dedicating myself to music took me quite a while, but I think it was necessary to approach it with the correct state of mind, to allow myself to be vulnerable and accept failure as an inherent part of growth. Had I begun too early, I might have lost sight of this and given up when things got hard. I am grateful for everything in life that has led me to this moment.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I create under the moniker 8.Bit Ghost. I am a music maker and curator. I wear many hats: DJ, music producer, film composer, audiophile, and sound designer. I do it all for the love of sound.

Since I was a kid, I was always obsessed with anything that made noise. I would sit with my dad and listen to albums, absorbing the music and always asking questions, forming a web of musical knowledge deep in my psyche. I had a toy tape recorder and would carry it everywhere, singing and making recordings. Eventually, I got a guitar and become enamored with it and the musicians who made it their claim to fame. In college, I discovered electronic music which opened up a new world of sound, realizing that music exists beyond the typical archetype of drums, bass, guitar, and vocals. Suddenly, music was everywhere: the chirp of birds or the dull hum of a running car motor. I started to listen intently to music in film, TV, radio, and experimenting with computer programs that would allow me to express myself beyond the 6 strings of a guitar. After a series of stops and starts with dead-end jobs, I realized I had to harness the one constant in my life; music, and dedicate myself to making it my “career”.

When working with a client, I try to envision their idea and how sounds fit into that vision. Does the client need original music? Do they need a particular set of sounds that fit a mood? What feeling is meant to be conveyed? How can I convey these feelings with my skillset as a music maker? What types of instruments would be most appropriate?

By immersing myself in the medium, I try to come up with ways in which sound can help the client achieve their particular objective.

Perhaps the work for which I am most proud is the score to the short film IRIS, which will hit the film festival circuits this 2023 season. IRIS is a Sci-Fi film that evokes some chilling ideas and creates a particularly unnerving atmosphere. Bringing the audio side of this work to life really stretched me as a creative, and I truly admire the director and what he set out to do with his project.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

This is a big one. Most people consume their art on streaming platforms like Netflix and Spotify. In the case of Spotify especially, it can be difficult for artists to subsist on listeners’ streams alone. In fact, it takes 250 streams for an artist to earn $1.00 as of June 2022.

In order for listeners to support the people that they enjoy listening to, it’s often necessary to look beyond Spotify to a creator’s own website or other mediums where they can more directly support the artist. Bandcamp, while still with its own inherent issues, is one example where a listener can purchase an artist’s work and have them keep a majority of the proceeds.

It is imperative that we find ways to bring value to music again. When an artist is receiving pennies for streams, it devalues the art and the music. As we have seen most recently with major events like CoViD, the art and the arts are extremely important for society not only as a form of entertainment, but also as a way to preserve our history (art has always been studied in a historical context, for example).

If you really enjoy an artist, then look further than streaming services to support them. Buy an album from them or buy their merchandise. Go see them perform live. Donate money to them. After all, artists must pay bills and be able to live comfortably in order to continue to produce the content that listeners enjoy.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

To build something out of nothing. To create a piece of music that’s meant to decorate time. Where there was once silence, now is a piece of music which changes the whole mood of a room or provides a unique ambience and journey for the listener.

Think of how music can literally set the tone for an entire piece of art: a trailer for a comedy is recut and chilling, atmospheric music is added. Suddenly, the lighthearted comedy becomes a moody horror-thriller. That kind of power is truly awesome to me, the power of music.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.8bitghost.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/8.bit_ghost/?hl=en
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@8bitghost526