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Tasogare: Twilight. The light between day and night.

Live Recordings from:
Minamo
Sawako + Hofli
Moskitoo
Solo Andata
Taylor Deupree

Recorded live on April 10th and 11th, 2010, Tasogare: Live in Tokyo documents the performances of five 12k artists at two temples in Tokyo, Japan. Komyoji Temple (April 10th) saw the first-ever performance in Japan by Australia’s Solo Andata, known for creating deep, textured music with found objects, homemade instruments and very little in the way of electronics or software tricks. The duo was joined by 12k veteran Sawako whose voice and delicate computer work were accompanied by guitarist Hofli and Moskitoo who always plays the line between experimentalism and abstract pop.

On April 11th, the 12k weekend moved to the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Jiyu Gakuen Myonichi-kan where Solo Andata performed again, this time with the improvisational beauty of the four-piece Minamo and label- founder Taylor Deupree whose travel-worn state musically played out in the most hushed and calming way.

Tasogare: Live in Tokyo represents the importance of recording and keeping documents of performances seen and heard around the far corners of the globe – a chance for many others to hear what went on a world away in live sets that can’t, and won’t be duplicated again.This edition also represents the adventures formed by artists connected by a label, sharing travels, food, photography, music and sleepless nights. It is the way in which each artist, in their own unique and completely different sounding way, contributes to a collective spirit.

For this wonderful 7-inch Taylor Deupree restricted himself to a minimal selection of tools comprising just one synthesizer, two field recordings and, for the first time ever, his voice. *Journal* and *Attic* were inspired by all the things in life we’ll never do and all the people we’ll never meet. They’re designed to invoke thoughts questioning those unknowns. Like two dusty old reels found in an attic, both tracks quietly reflect age and missed opportunities, worn and weathered like memories that never happened. Inspirational.

Almost 3 years have passed since the release of Northern, Taylor Deupree’s last proper full-length album on 12k. For Deupree, Northern was a particularly personal work, with the added pressure of following up what many considered to be his seminal album, Stil. By many accounts, Northern was even more widely praised than its predecessor and set Deupree on a path of a more tactile organic sound. Since Northern, Deupree has released a number of short solo works: Sea Last (12k2011), 1am (12k2004), and Live1:Mapping (12k3006), as well as the remixed reissue of Northern (12k2009). These works have seen Deupree incorporate more acoustic instrumentation into his sound world, culminating with Weather & Worn (12k2012), which not only saw its release on vinyl (a first for 12k) but was also Deupree’s first work created without synthesizers.

The path then had been laid for Shoals, an album referencing the sonic and emotional world that can be discovered by scraping away surfaces to reveal a worn interior of comfort and time.

Shoal: a sandbank or sand bar in the bed of a body of water, especially one that is exposed above the surface of the water at low tide.

Shoals is perhaps Deupree’s most specific album in material concept and sound. In late 2009, he was invited to an artist residency program at the University of York (UK) Music Research Center. He was given the freedom to create a project with the resources of the University and staff at his disposal. The idea was to find a unique idea that he would be unable to realize in his own studio – and this was when he discovered the University’s extensive collection of Javanese and Balinese gamelan instruments. Without hesitation, the groundwork was established for his project at the residency: he would create an album using only these instruments by developing a simple yet powerful audio looping program in the Kyma programming language to capture it all and provide the structure for the finished pieces.

After the first day in the studio, Deupree quickly realized that he was less interested in the traditional ways these instruments were played and more fascinated by the sounds of the surfaces of the instruments. And so he began to utilize their edges and undersides and find their flaws, such as broken strings. These instruments, played by scraping, tapping, or with an eBow, became the basis for long and meditative looping beds of sound. In addition, the microphones in the studio would by accident occasionally pick up the sounds of Deupree moving around, brushing the edge of an instrument or setting down mallets. These incidental sounds became as important as the instruments themselves and lend an incredibly physical element to the recordings. Much of Shoals is the sound of microphones in a room as Deupree loops and composes live.

The software Deupree developed in Kyma allowed him to very simply layer loops and change pitches of his sounds, often transposing them down 2 or 3 octaves to further emphasize the cracks and fragments. After recording many hours of densely layered loops during the residency, Deupree returned to his 12k studio and finessed the works into the 4 tracks on Shoals, each based around one of the loops.

The result is an album that has the slow pace of Stil. mixed with the acoustic imperfections of Weather & Worn and the randomness of Occur. Particles of percussive sounds – bells, wood, mallets – are caught by the loop and repeated into a hypnotic underbelly that is coated with a loosely strung Celempung droned by an eBow. The unexpected and almost playful sounds of the instruments’ natural surfaces and room sounds are in stark contrast to the smooth tonal melodic elements, yet together they create an immersive space that seems to offer a microcosm of exploration.

Given the strict instrumental concept Deupree placed on himself, Shoals is certainly one of the most challenging and singular visions he has created. Abandoning any hint of the “pop” elements that have sometimes crept into his music in recent years, he has combined the structure of his past with the sounds of his present to create a truly warm and alluring album (that Deupree recommends for night-time listening) that connects the floating dots of his most important work into a cohesive and definitive statement.

Shoals (Edition) is a companion release to Taylor Deupree’s 2010 full-length CD Shoals. This limited edition 7” record has a shortened version of “A Fading Found” (from the album) on Side A and a B-Side called “Sere.” While the 7” format only allows for brief works – and in this case extracted from much longer compositions – Edition creates intimate and physical vignettes into these highly acoustic and tactile recordings.

Shoals (Edition) is packaged in 12k’s 7” style with a heavy chipboard sleeve letterpressed with dark green ink.

Transience, ephemerality. There is beauty in things that don’t last. Taylor Deupree’s Snow (Dusk, Dawn), a multimedia project incorporating sound and photography, is based around 63 photographs taken with expired polaroid film. This particular film produces images cast with other-worldly blueish hues and almost immediately begin to fade; losing color, to deep browns, and then finally, within 24 hours after being shot, to complete black.

Deupree’s work is often inspired by nature, particularly the winterscapes near his home and studio in rural New York. With the polaroid film in hand, which he knew would capture only a fleeting image, he shot images during the first heavy snowfall of the winter of 2009, at dusk, in the setting sun; nothing was to last, the snow, the image, the day. The next morning, barely at sunrise, he set out again to finish the film, in a dawn that wasn’t going to last.

As quickly as he could, following each photo session, Deupree scanned the polaroid prints, capturing the first white snow in ghostly blue before the pictures faded to black. Each of these scanned images is printed and displayed next to its original, black polaroid counterpart in the package along with the cd. Each copy of this edition of 63 is thus rendered unique, each with a different print and polaroid.

For the music portion of the project there is also contrast, transience, and decay. A fragile melodic loop, distressed by surface noise, struggles to keep its repetitive flow over a quiet and languid 18 minutes as it subtly, but constantly, loses ground and eventually becomes fragmented and falls away amongst the elements that surrounded it.

Snow (Dusk, Dawn) captures the essence of what much of Deupree’s work is about: imperfection, time, and memory. He uses both high- and low-tech means of creating rich works that scrape away at the surface of digital sterility. Avoiding the con- trolled manipulation offered by computers he prefers natural and unpredictable processes to add depth and texture to this work. Outdated film, cheap cameras, dust and leaking light effect his photographs while guitars, found percussion, old analog synthesizers and recordings of falling snow provide the soundtrack to a moment in time that comes and goes like dawn.

This edition is being presented at the NADiff Gallery in Tokyo, Japan on April 15th as part of Deupree’s Polaroid photography show, Unseen.

The edition contains: 3″ CD – Original Polaroid print – Color print of pre-faded Polaroid image – Letterpress card.

A PDF file of the entire edition can be viewed HERE.