Dr. Alphonse Mabuse

Doc Mabuse, a.k.a. Mike Murphy, is a St. Louis native and founding member of that city’s HEARding Cats artists’ collective. He makes a living designing software and hardware (“wares, soft to firm to hard,” as he puts it) but spends most of his time building synthesizers, which he uses to make wild and entirely left-field improvised music. The instruments, which he labels either “modules” or “electroniums” (meaning “a synthesizer that acts suspiciously like it’s broken”), have names like The Jackelope, The Feminine Prerogative-Based Control-Voltage Generator and il Viaggio di Marconi, the last of which is a gorgeous object built from a box of chocolates he once received for Christmas. Murphy is co-founder of HEARding Cats along with Rich O'Donnell (a former percussionist with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and music director of the St. Louis New Music Circle), Davey Williams (an avant-garde guitarist and co-founder of The Improviser, a journal of experimental music) and the jazz pianist and North Little Rock native Chris Parker.