About / EPK

About

The Binary Marketing Show is the experimental music project of Abram Morphew and Bethany Carder. Originally formed as a recording project in 2000, their work moves through improvisation, ecological sound, homemade electronics, synthesis, percussion, strings, wind instruments, voice, and shifting song forms.

The first release by Morphew and Carder as a duo, Clues From the Past (2010), received a mention on NPR’s All Songs Considered and won an Independent Music Award for Best EP. An extensive period of touring followed, alongside albums, singles, splits, and collaborations released through labels including Already Dead Tapes, Antiquated Future Records, Cold Rhymes Records, and Obsolete Media Objects.

In 2019, a profound health initiation reshaped their relationship to practice. The project began to shift away from performance as its primary mode and toward participation, recording, listening, and sound as a space for healing, play, and inquiry. This brought The Binary Marketing Show back to its roots as a recording practice while opening a deeper exploration of voice, improvisation, the body, and the more-than-human world.

Working from a Linux-based home studio using open-source recording tools, Morphew and Carder approach the studio as an instrument and a place of inquiry: a space for listening to the relationships between body, Earth, sound, and cosmos.

This inquiry has developed into a series called Astro Lore, a five-year body of work using astronomical cycles as structures for sustained improvisational practice. Rather than using astrology as a predictive system that tells us who we are, Astro Lore attends to the actual movements of planets and luminaries through the constellations as invitations to listen, notice, and create in real time.

The practice began with Lunar Lore, following the changing phases of the Moon through a full lunar year and allowing distinct bodies of music to emerge around the New, First Quarter, Full, and Last Quarter phases. From there, Solar Lore followed the Sun through thirteen constellations across a solar year. The project is now moving through Mercurial Lore, continuing the same sustained practice of listening and improvisation with Mercury, with Venus and Mars cycles to follow.

Each Astro Lore series extends into ecological video, shaped through sustained attention to local plants, animals, water, weather, light, and landscape. These images bring Earth and cosmos into the same field of attention, looking toward our more-than-human kin for ways of understanding what is present and real beyond exclusively human-centered narratives. The work asks how we might imagine our planetary presence differently: not solely as consumers of Earth, but as participants and tenders within a living ecology.

Lineage of Study

The Binary Marketing Show’s evolving practice is informed by sustained study with artists working across sound, voice, movement, listening, and consciousness. Bethany and Abram have studied with Laraaji and Arji OceAnanda through Deep Listening, laughter meditation, dream work, ambient sound, and immersive study at CAMP and Esalen; with Glenn and Elizabeth Copeland through explorations of art as a practice of possibility; and with Colin Self through interdisciplinary approaches to voice, sound, and collective practice.

In fall 2026, this inquiry continues through in-person study with Merrill Garbus at CAMP in France, exploring voice and vocal practice, followed in December by Meredith Monk and Ellen Fisher’s Voice as Practice at Garrison Institute, bringing voice, movement, listening, and the body further into the evolving language of the work.

The practice is also informed by the work of Pauline Oliveros, Beautiful Painted Arrow, Kay Gardner, Vickie Dodd, Emilie Conrad, Anna Halprin, Gabrielle Roth, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Monica Gagliano. Together, these lineages have helped deepen The Binary Marketing Show’s inquiry into listening, improvisation, vibration, ecological relationship, embodied artistic practice, and the possibilities that emerge when we understand ourselves as participants within a living Earth and cosmos.

Press

“The more of this I hear, the less it confirms to easy description… Not sure how I missed them over the last decade and a half, but it’s time to play catch up.” – The Wire Magazine

“…dive into a musical adventure that defies convention and revels in the limitless possibilities of experimental soundscapes.” – electronica.org.uk

“…compositions centered around simple and distressed synth lines and reverb-heavy percussion with introspective and whip-smart lyrics.” – Tome to the Weather Machine

“From the opening clatter of ‘Weather Balloon’ we knew we were encountering some unique thinkers.” – Electric Sound of Joy

“So how does one classify the binary marketing show? Indie-Experimental-Electronic-Minimalism? Really-weird-but-endearing-and-sometimes-powerful? Yes, those all work. Although, more simply, how about: “really good”?” – Max Thorn of Independent Clauses

“The Binary Marketing Show take us on a trip into neglected realms of the imagination…” – Queen City Sounds

Astro Lore

Contact

Email binarymarketingshow at gmail dot com