Category: Music

An elaborate, authoritative acoustic re-imagining of Taylor Deupree’s seminal electronic album Stil. (2002), Sti.ll is the result of a multi-year collaboration between Deupree and arranger/producer Joseph Branciforte to bring Deupree’s explorations of extreme repetition and stillness into the world of notated chamber music. Clarinet, vibraphone, cello, double bass, flute, and percussion stand in for the digital loops and granular processing of Deupree’s original, with meticulously notated arrangements preserving the all rhythmic, formal, and textural complexity of these compositions. Transcribed and arranged by Greyfade’s Joseph Branciforte and performed by an ensemble of notable New York creative musicians — Madison Greenstone, Ben Monder, Laura Cocks, Christopher Gross, and Sam Minaie, alongside Branciforte and Deupree themselves — Sti.ll is a landmark recording situated between the electronic and acoustic worlds.

The Aer EP is the 2nd part of a trilogy of releases which began with ‘Eev’ and will conclude with ‘Ash’. If ‘Eev’ was a dark, dusky forest, ‘Aer’ is the release and escape. It begins with “Emerging,” … from the dust of “Eev” it cautiously makes itself known. The initial stage of upward movement, “Rising,” sees dark tones emerging from a thick cloud of teeming noise that eventually breaks and floats into the clearing above. “Dissipating” closes it out as everything becomes vapor, unraveled and lost once again.

Eev is Taylor Deupree’s latest stopover on a slow journey through ambient sound that has brought him acclaim and renown for over two decades. This EP explores the light and dark of an evening forest, both figuratively and literally. The decay and the growth stir tiny, fragile worlds.

Deupree is also known as being an avid collaborator and has worked with Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Sylvian, Jeremiah Fraites, and Fennesz, among others throughout his career. His work as an audio engineer has made technology at the forefront of his music as he explores its cracks and imperfections.

The Oldest Colors was a tour-only album released on cassette with private download codes. It debuted in Tokyo on November 13th, 2022 at a 12k anniversary event and was made available at subsequent shows until the tape sold out. There are no credits or track listing for the album and it will not appear for sale or streaming online.

Puremagnetik is pleased to release Small Winters from accomplished electronic musician and multi-media artist Taylor Deupree. More than just an album, the release is a collaboration between Deupree and Puremagnetik label owner Micah Frank, who developed a plugin—called Small Winters—that was fundamental to making the music.

Don’t be misled by the title; Small Winters has a warmth that feels more like the stirring of earth and sky than it does the stasis of winters. But small it is, at least in components, as Deupree crafted the music out of a minimal set of tools: an ARP 2600 synthesizer, a glockenspiel, cassette loops, and the Small Winters plugin.

Small Winters brought Deupree to Small Winters. As Frank explains, “Taylor suggested that a custom device might be an interesting way to constrain the album’s sonic palette. We bounced some ideas back and forth and came up with this concept of a broken Tascam 4-track from the future.” Small Winters is a 3-track recorder, looper, and splicer, with unlimited overdubbing on each track, and the audio on each track can further be processed on a granular and virtual tape effect bus (the plugin comes in AU/VST/VST3 for use on multiple platforms and in multiple DAWs for any listener who makes their own music).

The crackling, saturated sound of the album glows, it’s the source of that warmth, a diffused sonic back-lighting that surrounds the chiming notes, the sonic equivalent of dust motes floating in a sunbeam. This is a sound that comes out of Deupree’s interest in sonic “degradation.” He says, “I’m interested in a sort of melancholic and ‘pretty’ (for lack of a better term) sound,” one that he likes to take “to the edge of fragility … to sound like it could break at any moment, like walking on a beautiful but questionably frozen lake.”

That metaphor is the winter of Small Winters, especially as heard on the substantial side-A track, “Long Winter.” The balance between the air suffused through the album and the modest musical details is what Deupree says creates “tension in my music … and this is what I’m using the imperfections for and what I’m listening for, the moment when I feel the balance between the two sides is right.”

The Small Winters plugin helped create that tension and balance, as did what Deupree describes as guitar pedals and “some cassette tapes.” The context transforms the classic sounds of the ARP 2600 and the metallic chiming of the glockenspiel into floating, glowing sonic objects, with the tactile surface feeling of gauze and burlap. In “Long Winter,” these sounds drift like a mobile, while in the series of shorter tracks on side-B, they form pulses and rhythms like dance tunes imagined in daydreams.

Through delicate tracks like “air” and “elm,” the music shimmers into existence and then loops around itself. The patterns repeat and build deep impressions and complex rhythms, one pattern against others. Deupree says these sound like “polymetrics … loops of differing lengths that combine to form non-repeating patterns.” He adds that “starting out as a drummer, rhythm is important for me, so I’m always listening, if not for precise rhythm, then for timing and durations.”

String those together, put them into order, and pulse and rhythm appear. Sequence patterns, play percussion, and degrade that, and warm, complex sound appears. Assemble all these elements in Small Winters, and an album like Small Winters emerges.