TAYLOR DEUPREE
Shoals
12K1060
12K 2010
04 Tracks. 45mins18secs

Amazon UK: DLD US: DLD Boomkat: CD | DLD iTunes: DLD

Musician, sound artist, photographer, graphic designer… Taylor Deupree is above all an artist who uses a wide array of tools to document the world around him. He has collected part of his interpretations of it on several albums and countless EPs, published primarily on his own 12K imprint, but also on labels as diverse as Mille Plateaux, Spekk, Fällt, Plop, Room40 and Raster-Noton. Beside his solo projects, Deupree has also published a number of collaborative works with artists such as Christopher Willits, Kenneth Kirschner, Solo Andata, Savvas Ysatis or Stephane Mathieu. It has been three years since his last album, Northern, was published, and although he has been far from inactive during that time (he has released a number of shorter formats), Shoals is his first full length release since.

The project originates in an artist residency program Deupree was invited to undertake at the University of York Music Research Centre at the end of 2009, with the aim of conceiving a piece of work which he would not normally be able to create in his studio. Discovering the vast collection of Javanese and Balinese gamelan instruments, Deupree rapidly developed an interest in the sounds he could capture by using the whole instruments as source rather than documenting their natural use, and processing them using a specially developed looping program. Returning to his studio in Brooklyn, Deupree used these sources to create the four pieces collected on this record.

The result is a particularly textural and organic collection where surface noises and tiny sound particles dominate. Despite the processing that has taken place during and after the recordings, Shoals is above all about acoustic components and ambience. This occasionally takes the shape of Deupree’s movements caught by the microphones used, or tape hiss, as noticeable on the title track. Like always in such case, these imperfections give the final recordings an element of vulnerability and render them extremely real. Each of the four tracks is built from one loop which is left to develop progressively from a basic setting into much more complex and layered forms.

Expectedly, the pace is very slow and the tone contemplative, but there is, like often in Deupree’s work, an underlying cinematic aspect which places this record on a different level to a purely ambient record. Here, he creates rather startlingly vast soundscapes which, at times, evoke the icy surroundings of polar expanses, and at others hectic microscopic life forms. There is also an unusually earthiness, possibly characterised by the materials the source instruments are made of (wood, skin essentially). This is tempered by occasional glittering bells and chimes, especially on Falls Touching Grasses, which give the pieces a resonance which would otherwise be absent.

The electro-acoustic nature of Shoals places it quite singularly in Taylor Deupree’s body of work. He has experimented with similar settings before, and has, in recent years, moved towards a more acoustic-based approach, but it takes here a very different connotation. Despite its introspective and contemplative tone, this album has an impressive stature which makes it one of Deupree’s best recordings to date.

4.7/5

Taylor Deupree | Taylor Deupree (MySpace) | 12K
Amazon UK: DLD US: DLD Boomkat: CD | DLD iTunes: DLD

SOLO ANDATA/SEAWORTHY/TAYLOR DEUPREE
Live In Melbourne
12k2008
12K 2008
03Tracks. 49mins.37secs

Photographer, sound artist and label manager Taylor Deupree took to recording the festivities housed under the Social Club one April night in Melbourne, Australia. With good reason, too, for the night displayed here bristles with a vast array of events, too numerous to catalogue. The sonic endeavors of Solo Andata, Seaworthy, and Deupree himself, are filtered through a refined sensibility, resulting in a work of coherent flow and balance, and, perhaps most importantly, an ephemeral elegance bound to a very real sense of time and place.

Solo Andata, who released the splendid Fyris Swan on Hefty Records some while ago, gives this album its first breath. As on that album, the duo display a feel that is gimlet-eyed and spartan, with woozy but tight harmonies winding through loops and whispers of distortion added for tonal color. There is something quite alluring about the discernment and lightness of touch that the duo possess in the ease with which they see the elements carefully through a varied series of deconstructions and reconstructions – moving blithely and effectively from glassine timbral masses, with piano rotating in eccentric orbits, to ethereal and minimalist, to finally a tempered sort of jazz, where isolated guitar lines sound over a shimmer of metallophones, embedded in a galaxy of bass drones.

From here, Seaworthy provides a variation on a track initially featured on his 12K release, Map In Hand. His performance style is intensely fleet. Over the course of the nineteen-minute composition, slow, moving acoustic guitar figures tighten and relax across continually shifting tempos, found sounds, and sonorous humming. In a piece that seems lo-fi in comparison to the meticulous nature of his full-length albums, Deupree says the final farewell with a staid, intimate, and attractive electronic composition that constantly seems to be withdrawing into itself so as to amass itself upon itself. On a whole, there is a reasuring, wraparound quality to much of this recording, like soaking in a forest pool.

4.2/5

Solo Andata | Seaworthy | Taylor Deupree (MySpace) | 12K

WILLITS + SAKAMOTO
Ocean Fire
12K1046
12K 2008
07 Tracks. 56mins02secs

Ocean Fire is the result of the meeting of two visionary musicians willing to explore a common creative ground. With a career spanning over thirty years at the forefront of contemporary and experimental music, Ryuichi Sakamoto certainly needs no introduction. While he has been recording for a more modest ten years and releasing music commercially since his 2001 debut Pollen for Fällt, Christopher has since released music on 12K, Sub Rosa, Ghostly International and Room40 to name but a few and has regularly been collaborating with Taylor Deupree.

This collaborative effort between Willits and Sakamoto was recorded live during a series of improvisations at Ryuichi Sakamoto’s studio in New York almost two years ago and edited down to just under an hour and seven tracks. Ocean Fire combines Willits’s guitar work and Sakamoto’s contribution on the piano, processed into dense layers of sounds which ebb and flow in gentle tides or run in powerful underlying currents. There is an undeniable uniformity of sound running through the whole record as Willits’s and Sakamoto’s respective parts thaw into one another, yet each piece casts a totally unique mark on the entire work. On opening track Toward Water, Willits and Sakamoto devise warm and voluptuous sonic drapes, adorned with occasional granular overtones, which slowly evolve from tightly woven soundscapes to vast nebular forms over the course of the piece. Umi, which follows, appears to stem from a similar but is cut short just before the three minute mark, leaving a disconcerting vacuum before the gritty tentacles of Sea Plains reach out. Primarily built around statics and crackles and covered with dense metallic sheets of noise, Willits and Sakamoto find themselves between post industrialism and isolationism, but Sentience brings them back on more hospitable terrains. More peaceful and ethereal, this composition offers a welcome relief after the abrasive textures of its predecessor and provides an opportunity to clearly witness the subtle change of flow and density that the pair constantly applies throughout Ocean Fire.

There is, in the last three tracks of the album, a notable shift toward denser soundscapes, especially on Chi-Yu and Cold Heat. Here, the rising tide of increasingly heavy sonic layers progressively crushes everything in its path. While both pieces are somewhat linear and monolithic, the pair draws on rich overtones and textures to permeate the austere grounds on which these two pieces develop. Ocean Sky Remains closes the album and feels as if the calm is returning after the devastating effect of a storm. While there is still a trace of the sombre clouds of the two preceding tracks, the atmosphere is undeniably lighter and less oppressive, leaving a strong impression of tranquillity as it eventually dies down.

It is virtually impossible to distinguish between Willits’s and Sakamoto’s contribution, so tightly are their respective inputs woven together and so extreme is the treatment of the original sources, yet it very much serves the work by creating an extremely cohesive and unique sound distanced from the pair’s usual exploratory grounds.

4.1/5

Christopher Willits | Ryuichi Sakamoto | 12K
Buy: CD

AUTISTICI
Volume Objects
12k1045
12K 2008
09 Tracks. 44mins05secs

Autistici gives over his first full-length to the object – to its ruses and to its allure. It’s something evident in both the album and the photographs that accompany it. Shots of metallic wires and their sharp calm; woodboards and their comforting simplicity; even a granular wall, wrinkled like an aged face, betrays a mystery that cannot be exhumed. Never in any of this is there a subject to be found.

In the album, too, pieces aren’t driven by a compositional (subjective) sense. Autistici is concerned with tracing the line of sound itself, with letting it develop, fleshing it out by (re)approaching it time and again from weirdly skewed studio perspectives. Autistici ensures that the featured objects or source sounds are indeed of a spectral nature. The edges of each are smoothed down or frayed, and polished until they gleam in a way that makes them all sound strangely similar. Wire Cage For Tiny Birds features prickly whirlpools and a glassy shimmer that suggests rain falling in a moonlit sky, but then, in a stealthy manner, Autistici eclipses that presence with clouds of sweet cosmic static. It is these juxtapositions which manage to plant a sense of quietly astonishing incident within these works. There is a bracing astringency and definite economy of approach to the compositions, yet the fluid subtlety of construction either affords them a certain dramatic momentum or the ability to brim with richness.

Only on occasion does he seem to get lost in the labyrinth of his own project, the digital twists and cut-ups getting somewhat away from him. Otherwise these glitchscapes achieve a radiance of appearance, refracting sound sources into a mercurial flood, allusively suggesting form and structure, and maintaining just enough textural warmth and serendipitous, fleeting beauty to sustain the listener along the way.

4/5

Autistici | 12K
Buy: iTunes