Category: Music

One night in April, 2007, the beautiful city of Melbourne, Australia was host to a small gathering of sound-lovers and curious passers-by descending on the venerable Northcote Social Club for a night of subtle soundscaping by Oz-natives Solo Andata and Seaworthy and New Yorker Taylor Deupree, who was in Australia for a tour. After a great meal and despite the ghosts of the BBC hijacking the audio system, the three artists set out to capture the focused listeners with beds of abandoned melodies and warm acoustic tangles.

In hopes to capture the memories of the night, and a snapshot of live audio and all of its imperfections, Deupree recorded the evening with the intent of producing this cd. Live in Melbourne pairs labelmates Seaworthy and Deupree with Solo Andata, anewcomer to 12k, who all share in a similar sonic aesthetic.

Solo Andata performed with laptop and a host of small instruments and electronics creating dense and careful beds of disjointed, yet beautiful music. Seaworthy transformed the stunning, sparse drones of his Map in Hand album into a live, improvised experience that captured all of the emotion that’s created by a single musician and his guitar. Deupree rounded off the night with his characteristically sparse bed of tones and digital detritus.

Favourite Places brings together field and  compositional recordings depicting places of importance and significance within the lives of contemporary artists.

“No doubt everybody must have a place that they call their own. A place which you cherish and go back. Like a forest, the bath, a museum or an alley. These are just four of the examples on this CD of ten pieces of artists’ favorite places which they were asked to record and then treat those recordings into a music piece – both source and composition are inside one track. The whole project comes with photos and coordinates. All neat and carefully planned. The end result is certainly as great. From forest walk by Taylor Deupree to the lighthouse of Biosphere, from the bath of Dot Tape Dot and the studio of Leafcutter John – it all sounds intimate and the music they play as a result of these intimate recordings is of a likewise intimate nature. Drones, glockenspiel, acoustic guitar and rhythms make up eerie music. It moves away from the previous compilations by this label that the artists are better known, musicwise it moves more towards ambient and less to techno music (in all it’s guises) and the thematic approach. Topped off with an elaborate packaging (both print work and jewel case) this is the best effort on Audiobulb so far. Also included are Claudia, John Kannenberg, RF, Aaron Ximm, Build and Nomad Palace. Very lush. ” – Vital Weekly

The 12k Promo Sampler is a cd that features one track from the 10 most recent 12k releases (from 12k1046 back). We are giving this cd away in December 2007 and January 2008 and selling it at a low cost afterwards. It’s a great way to introduce a new listener to the sounds of 12k or for our experienced listeners to catch a tune from a release they’ve perhaps missed.

As Alain De Botton suggests in his book ‘The Art Of Travel’, the act of transit between social, cultural and geographic circumstance is far more than mere bodily movement. Language, architecture, food, gesture, landscape and sound all play a part in travel and ultimately contribute to the sensations of excitement, exoticism, disorientation and even fear that occupy the daily life of the traveller.

At points of departure and arrival on these journeys increasingly lies an airport. Like business hotels across the globe, the airport acts as a uniform presence – rotating gates, the clunk of baggage, the vague chatter of tourist and traveller alike and the occasional interruption of muffled announcements. Vast halls echoing with the shifting of bodies intent on exodus and return.

As Socrates wrote, ‘Man must rise above the Earth – to the top of the atmosphere and beyond – for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives [sic]’. Indeed, as the choreography of pre-flight checks is conducted following the gentle rock of the plane leaving the air bridge to a soundtrack of gentle pressurised drone and air conditioned hiss, a meditation commences. This moment of consideration is heightened, as the reflected sound of the engines scorching the tarmac surface is vacuumed into the void of open air and as the plane leaves the earth there is (in every traveller no matter how still experienced) a sense of silent awe at the marvels of the physics of flight.

Airport Symphony, commissioned by the Queensland Music Festival and Brisbane Airport Corporation, documents and synthesises the experiences of travel.

Each piece represents a personal meditation on aspects of travel in the modern age and suggests ways in which we control, augment and ultimately exists in a time where almost no part of the face of the planet is inaccessible. Each of the pieces features a source recording made in and around Brisbane Airport between March and June 2007 –in a raw form or transformed by processing.

Audio diary entries cataloguing the epic possibilities of flight, aero-passage and human bodies in motion and even at rest. Lawrence English, June 2007

All field recordings by Lawrence English

The collaborative efforts of Athens native Savvas Ysatis and New Yorker Taylor Deupree were well known in the early and mid 1990s through their work as SETI, Futique, and Arc, as well as their soundtrack to Japanese architect Toyo Ito’s famed Tower of Winds building in Yokohama, Japan. After going their separate ways – Ysatis to recording for Tresor in Berlin, and Deupree to founding the 12k label – they have united again for their first project in nearly 10 years.

Almost all of Ysatis and Deupree’s projects were founded not only on conceptual ideas, but on technical processes as well, setting rules and restrictions on themselves to help focus their creative energies in the endless playground of the studio. Whether it was the complex sound design of SETI or the cassette-tape-sourced sample manipulation of Tower of Winds, Ysatis and Deupree continually reinvented themselves, moving from ambient, to lounge, to minimal techno.

Their new EP, The Sleeping Morning, was created during a week-long visit from Greece to the US. Ysatis and Deupree wanted to freely create and see what came naturally after a 10-year hiatus from working together in the studio. However, their session quickly turned into an album guided by a select set of instruments and methods which led to their most unique work to date. The music flowed naturally, and the 10 years disappeared into a day.

All of the instrumentation; acoustic guitar, autoharp, various bits of percussion, and analog synthesizers, were performed directly to multi-track with very little editing (they preferred to re-take rather than edit). The duo recorded much of the sound with with microphones to capture roomtone which created a warm, organic and often playful mood. Loose drums, the squeak of a monosynth and lush pads from the Jupiter-8 make The Sleeping Morning appear at first as an experiment in micro-folk but when vocal tracks are added a whole new world of song-structure and post-something is created.

The four tracks they recorded hint at a variety of new avenues that Ysatis and Deupree can explore. Their extensive music careers and long history of collaboration and friendship have given them experience rich with insight and experimentation – and with the low price of airfare and the affordability of decent grappa, there will certainly be a chance to continue what they began 14 years ago.