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Savvas Ysatis and Taylor Deupree were at it again in Deupree’s country studio, about two years after the creation of 2007’s The Sleeping Morning EP. They gave themselves one week to see what they could create with the studio as a blank canvas, and the two emerged with Hourglass, four songs of carefully crafted pop-infused ambient music destined for release on 12” vinyl.

Hourglass follows in The Sleeping Morning’s footsteps with two instrumental pieces and two vocal songs created with a multitude of acoustic instruments, analog synthesizers and very little computer aided programming. The idea of treating the computer as a tape deck instead of a programming device was vital to their process as they surrounded themselves in the studio with as many noise-making objects as possible, shunning nothing if it could be used in interesting ways.

“Clouds” opens the A-Side with a crisp and spacious arrangement fueled by Ysatis’ airy vocals and a warm, driving harmonica line over a bed of bass synths and looping autoharp. Utilizing room tones, microphones and treated guitar, “Hourglass” is a distant, longing and highly textured escape into ambient territory that the duo knows so well. Side B opens with the 2nd “poppish” song, “Like Ice On A Summer’s Day”, aptly titled for both its glistening and warm textures driven by acoustic guitar and the spacey swirls of a Jupiter-8. “Somewhere On Earth” closes out the EP in an organic mood where the whole studio becomes a live, swirling world of improvised instruments and playful experimentation.

Hourglass is the much anticipated next step for Ysatis and Deupree who have been collaborating since 1994 and have been known for embracing many different genres with their critically acclaimed catalog of releases.

The Hourglass 12” is limited to 400 numbered copies and comes packaged in a beautifully printed full color jacket. Each copy includes a coupon with a code to download both Flac and MP3 versions of the songs. Additionally, the EP will be available from 12k’s usual digital retailers.

‘Transcriptions’, a collaborative work by Stephan Mathieu and Taylor Deupree, contains 8 tracks of music that is both historic, decayed, angelic and revolving, while also existing in warmth, purity, and transcendence through acoustic instruments, and vintage synthesizer.

Delving deeply into the history of the earliest recording methods through mechanical phonographs, Stephan Mathieu created a method using wax-cylinders, the predecessor of records, as well as 78s, which have a larger frequency range, to create his music through playback of these pieces of musical history. With a setup consisting of playing the cylinders through two portable gramophones, and then sending them directly into the computer by microphone, Mathieu was able to record the sounds, and perform software processing in realtime, rendering a resulting flow of deteriorated angelic elegance, decomposed beauty, and reborn awakenings.

From this result, Taylor Deupree worked with the recordings, adding acoustic instruments and vintage synthesizer; adding-to, while still maintaining the physicality of the 78s, opening the range of the tracks through unalloyed analog contributions. Upon first listening, it might be thought that the contributions of Taylor Deupree were merely additions to original material, but when listening further, once the music has breathed openly, it can be heard actually how much the cylinder recordings of Stephan Mathieu shape the open pathways of Deupree’s acoustics, allowing for a breadth of incredible range. Not merely a compliment, but a modern counterpart.

Through nearly 48 minutes of music, self-described as warm and enveloping, these sounds represent the pivotal movements of the unique, the saturated, and the exploratory, all colliding in what may be sometimes a wave of revolving fuzz, swirling melodies of the supernatural and the human, the delicate echoes of single revolutions, and gentle plucks of the guitar. It is both a conversation, and a translation of both sides. Transcription, after all, means notating the unnotated.

The result of the century-apart sources combined with the methodology and talent of these two leading experimentalists creates an immutable, impressing magnetism, while still balancing so gently on the vibrations of the decayed, and the frail humanity of the past.

“On one particularly cold and rainy winter day, tired and a bit down, I sat on my studio floor and surrounded myself with a pile of small instruments, my acoustic guitar, and my looping pedals. Pixel, one of my cats, was sleeping next to me as I began to create a warm bed of drones and small noises in an attempt to warm the room and my spirits.

As fate would have it, during the very same day, I had laid out all of the steps before me needed to finally bring 12k into the world of vinyl, lining up manufacturers, printers, and design ideas. It seemed perhaps more than coincidence, then, that I had actually been sitting down to write what would become the two short pieces on this 7”. It only took a look at the weather outside the window and then at a dusty piece of vinyl still sitting on the turntable since autumn for me to know immediately the title and feel of these pieces.

Created in a short number of days, “Weather” and “Worn” actually mark the first recordings I have done solely with acoustic instruments and a minimum of effect processing. Although not entirely planned, these two pieces are quite fittingly warm and a bit noisy, scratchy and tactile. Each track is based around a drone and then extended by further explorations around the same note. There is a stillness and feeling of tension which then give way to clarity. When the work is played loudly, it becomes ever-present, yet is gentle and calm when played softly. There is a sense of struggle between the weather and my mood, between the technology and imperfection…and only a run-out groove in the vinyl to keep these pieces from fading to complete silence.

During the cutting of “Worn” I realized that the 45 RPM record sounded beautifully hazy and languid on 33, so I set out to create an extended version of the track for the digital only release. Inspired by my Stil. album, I looped a portion of “Worn”, transposed the pitch and speed to match a 33-rpm record and let it run for 23 minutes. This cannot fit on a side of 7″ vinyl, so it became a digital-only track. 23 minutes is an arbitrary length… really it could run on for hours.”

Taylor Deupree
March 2nd, 2009

Weather & Worn launches the first in an ongoing series of 7” releases by 12k. Each will be packaged in a recycled chipboard jacket and printed with a minimum of plant-based inks. The clear 7” vinyl is protected by a matte-black sleeve embossed with a small 12k logo.

This release collects recordings of live performances by Taylor Deupree in Bern (CH), York (UK), Hiroshima & Yamaguchi (JP), as well as an unknown location. It focuses on the most quiet, drawn-out and linear moments of these concerts. Live1:Mapping is the first in a series of audio diaries that recollect far-away places, sleepless nights and the warm comfort of sound.

The recordings were done direct from the stage mixer to a portable digital recorder. Other than cropping the selected area and mastering, no additional edits or sounds have been added.

May is the latest collaboration between New York composers Taylor Deupree and Kenneth Kirschner.

Recorded on May 9, 2008 at the OFFF Festival in Lisbon, Portugal, the album represents the first available live recording of Deupree and Kirschner’s concert performances.

Continuing in the direction of their acclaimed post_piano series, Deupree and Kirschner’s live work explores the intersection between piano and state-of-the-art digital music technology.

For this performance, Deupree and Kirschner took an even more experimental approach than they have in past concerts:  sitting side by side at a single grand piano, they both played piano and both played laptop, with Kirschner playing the keys of the piano and Deupree directly manipulating the strings inside, even as they both shared the duties of electronic processing and sample manipulation.

The result is a rich and complex mixture of digital and acoustic timbres that breaks new ground in their ongoing exploration of the role of the piano in contemporary electronic music.