Falconeer Revives A Dream With Deja Reve

​“Tigerlily,” the opening track off the new album Deja Reve from New Haven’s own synth-pop rock angel Falconeer, catches you almost off guard. The synthesizer sizzles through the speakers, the rhythm repeating until you find yourself moving along, and when the beat drops you ask yourself, ​“where’s the party?” — until you realize that with this album the party can be anywhere you like. And that’s exactly what Falconeer (a.k.a. Gil Morrison) intended.

“My goal was to just get some music out,” said Morrison, noting that since he began performing as Falconeer in 2017, people have been coming up to him after his shows — known not only for their sound, but for their staging, which included plenty of flashing lights, fog, and other heady visuals — and asking if he had an album.

“When the pandemic hit, I realized people couldn’t see me live except livestreamed,” said Morrison. ​“I wanted to get what I had out. I had a full set that I had been playing for three years, so I recreated everything I do in an audio workstation.” Fans of Falconeer will recognize all the songs, he said. Some are newer and some are from the project’s beginning, but they all have been played live.

“If the album had a subtitle, it would be Deja Reve: Falconeer’s First Three Years,” Morrison said with a laugh.

Morrison’s music excels at capturing a specific time and place — the music video and video game saturated ​‘80s and early ​‘90s — in a way that embodies nostalgia for it while also reinvigorating the sounds that accompanied it. The sense of freshness makes it all more vivid and necessary as we look for a way to shake off the stillness that has enveloped our lives in the past year. Morrison himself has hardly been still at all. In addition to finishing the album, he performed live on site and in livestreams for The Cellar at Treadwell, and live at one of The Stack Sessions for District Arts and Education back in October.

“At the beginning of the pandemic I still had the plan to do the album, even though I had had that plan for three years,” said Morrison. ​“I explored different avenues, then thought I would save myself some money and record it myself.” This required a change of approach for Morrison, but he was more than up for the challenge.

“The pandemic was kind of a gift in a way,” he said. ​“When everything shut down it forced me to concentrate on things I could do home. Everyone’s lockdown was different. Mine was slow and fast at the same time. After a year of second-guessing myself, I said, ​‘it’s done.’ I could tweak it forever, but I just got to get this out.”

Morrison also questioned how his music would translate without the live show.

“A lot of what people like about me is very visual,” he said. ​“I thought, ​‘do I put a record out or do I put out a DVD?’ The goal of my songs has been nostalgia, especially for anyone who lived through the ​‘80s and early ​‘90s. I hope people who lived through it get that nostalgia, but also people who didn’t live through it and still loved it.”

Morrison himself did not live through it, but was affected by it nonetheless.

“I was born in the ​‘80s, so I remember a version of the ​‘80s that didn’t exist,” he said. ​“It was 2003 by the time I was into it. I heard the music and watched the music videos and said yes: the excessive fog and lighting and putting everything and anything into it. I try to recreate that and those authentic sounds.”

Morrison’s influences include Tears for Fears, Depeche Mode, Hall and Oates, Prince ​“definitely,” David Bowie’s “‘80s stuff,” and video game music, which he explained is a genre most people do not consider when talking about musical influences.

“People don’t realize or classify it as music,” he said. ​“They forget a huge part of the ​‘80s had the same motifs. If you didn’t listen you missed out.”
Morrison has a number of video game influences, but his number one is Streets of Rage, which he said is ​“the greatest video game music of all time.”

“It’s pre-CD era, and when CDs happened, they were recorded in the studio,” said Morrison. ​“With games like Nintendo DS and Sega Genesis, the music was recorded right into the game. Video game is code, and the game tells the system how to make music, so you have to code the music in. With Streets of Rage, it was 1992 and there was New Jack Swing, house music, club music, and that game captures it perfectly.” This also influenced how Morrison originally recorded his music as Falconeer.

“At the very beginning I was coding my music,” he said. ​“I had to get over myself. It was an excuse to not record. I need to get with the times.”

Production went from a Nintendo DS and a synth from 1986 to a laptop and newer synth, the laptop allowing Morrison to add in synchronized lights and visuals for his live shows. Over time he added even more to the visual side of the show, including fog and a ​“weird costume” consisting of a white jumpsuit and wings.

And though Morrison notes he has been developing Falconeer for around 10 years, he also has a varied and vivacious musical past. He played bass in the New Haven-based band Glamour Assassins from 2014 to 2017 and was a member of the band Mobius Striptease, born from the Rock Lottery in 2018, in which the band took home the top prize.

Morrison is a ​“self-taught” guitarist since age 15 and ​“self-taught everything else since then, including bass and synth and some drums.” His main focus now is playing synth and learning live production.

“It’s not just the music when I play,” he said. ​“I consider light, video, and fog an instrument.” Part of that live production also includes a greater concentration on video production for others through Falconeer Productions, which has its own YouTube channel as well as an Instagram page to showcase those talents.

“I’m trying to do video on and off,” he said ​“It’s my passion.”

After contributing videos to State House Cabaret events in 2019 and 2020, he was asked to shoot his first music video.

“The Right Offs asked and I said, ​‘sure, I’ll give it a shot,’” he said. That video, for the song ​“Post Bone Savvy,” led to another, a collaboration with Glittershot Productions for the song ​“We’ve Been Spotted.” Morrison said he would like to focus on more videos for more bands (and yes, he does have a YouTube channel dedicated to his own music and performances). But for this moment there is his own new release, which he is eager for the public to embrace, and new music already in the works.

“It’s currently happening, and it shouldn’t take three years this time,” he said with a laugh.

He is hoping to offer a livestreamed album release show and to play more live shows. One will be at 10 Selden on May 8 with the Forest Room, with whom he has played multiple shows in the past, has already been confirmed.

“Booking shows in the beginning was weird, but now it’s better,” he said.

He is looking forward to fans being able to have more opportunities for the full Falconeer experience — that pop synth dance free-for-all the album promises — as the weather improves and restrictions are eased up.

And though Morrison, like all of us, has experienced the pros and cons of isolation, he remains hopeful, even encouraging. ​“I end all of my shows with this quote,” he said. ​“We’re all made of stardust. Go do something stellar.”

Deja Reve is available for pre-order on Bandcamp and will be available on all streaming platforms on April 1.