Category: Music

Taylor Deupree & Kenneth Kirschner’s Post_Piano 2 continues the two New York composers’ collaborative investigation into the intersections of digital minimalism and experimental piano composition. Working with his childhood acoustic piano and the accidental sounds of an imperfect recording environment, Kirschner first composed a simple, austere “piano sketch” to serve as raw material for the project. This sketch was then passed on to Deupree, who created three new compositions entirely out of sounds derived from Kirschner’s piece. The two then collaborated on editing the new recordings, which transform the original piano sketch into a diverse array of sounds both familiar and unexpected. Like their previous CD, Post_Piano 22 is released as an open source project, and the composers invite other artists to continue the interpretation and transformation of their work in an ongoing process of open collaboration.

Kenneth Kirschner on Post_Piano 2:
“Taylor and I wrote Post_Pianoo in 2002, and since then I had added to my studio an actual acoustic piano – in fact, the very piano on which I first started studying at the age of 5. It’s an old piano, with an old sound, and I knew I wanted to use it for Post_Piano 2. But my studio doesn’t exactly offer a pristine environment for recording acoustic instruments – not least because an elevated train runs by the window every few minutes. My idea, therefore, was to emphasize the environmental sounds of the space, and create a piano piece that was as much a series of field recordings as an actual studio work. The result was “November 11, 2003” – a spare, fragmentary piano sketch recorded using techniques that ranged from the relatively high-tech to the very, very low-tech. This formed the source material for the entire project. And from that point on, the process was similar to our previous CD: the piano sketch was handed off to Taylor, who chopped it up in the computer and built new compositions from the resulting fragments. I encouraged him to focus as much on the accidental sounds – the passing subway, the street noises, the creaking of the old piano’s mechanisms – as on the piano notes themselves. Taylor wrote three long pieces using three distinct approaches, and each transforms the piano sketch into something new while still evoking the character of the original. His tracks have a modern, state-of-the-art sound – yet they never let you forget that what you’re hearing was once a piano. We then collaborated on the editing of these pieces, which make up the first three tracks of the CD. The final track is “November 11, 2003” itself; the CD thus concludes at the project’s beginning, with a coda that reveals the origin of all the sounds that preceded it. And as with the first post_piano, we’re presenting this new CD as an open source project: it’s released under an open license, and we eagerly look forward to hearing how our friends and colleagues take these old sounds and find new uses for them.”

Deupree and Willits unite again in their second collaborative release. Mujo builds on the duo’s growing process which was initiated on Audiosphere 08, the acclaimed Deupree / Willits CD released by Sub Rosa in late 2003. Mujo develops their collaborative and living process of generating music, and locates new paths and branches of sonic exploration.

Mujo is a Japanesse word that means “constant change”, or “transience”. Inspired by ideas and principles of wabi-sabi, Willits and Deupree set out to generate a music that celebrated the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. This music holds an elusive fragility. There are structural elements in constant flux, forms with cracks, melodies tickled with beautiful imperfections, phrases incomplete and broken. The music seeps, and wanders, remaining gaseous and solid all at once. The albums duration seems to trace a line, or flow from from light to dark, external to internal.

Built upon a series of loose jams and guitar improvisations, the music has a fresh under-produced and natural quality to it. Live collaborations were recorded in Deupree’s brooklyn studio in late fall 2003 and spring 2004, times of natural change and transformation.

Fragments and whole recordings of thoses sessions were subject to further processing in Willits’ San Francisco studio and in Deupree’s 12k headquarters. Mujo is the continued exploration of what will surely become a long and influential collaboration between these two unique sound artists/ musicians. Their work highlights each artist’s own unique aesthetics but more importantly creates a third, unique voice, that is not just a simple sum of their two sounds.

After a hiatus of over a year following the completion of the first series of Bip-Hop Generation compilation CDs, the French label Bip-Hop embarked on a second run of six albums. The new design is not as unifying or defining as the previous one, but the modus operandi of compiler Philippe Petitremains unchanged. Vol. 7 allots between ten and 15 minutes to six experimental electronica artists from six different countries, balancing sure values with names previously unknown. 12k guru Taylor Deupree gets to open the set, but his three lukewarm pieces, as decent as they may be, are quickly overrun by the other contributions. Emisor, aka the Argentinean electronician Leonardo Ramella, delivers bouncy, quirky tunes like a warmer, sunnier incarnation of Bovine Life. The Japanese duo Fonica blends guitar and electronics without sounding like Fennesz (a rarity these days!). Their 12-minute “Scoot” could have been a little bit shorter, but it still provides a highlight. So do Fm3’s two tracks. The pipa and the guzheng are two traditional Chinese string instruments, and they seem to be featured in “p.pa” and “zheng,” although heavily processed. There is a dreamy quality here one doesn’t naturally associate with China. Montreal’s Ghislain Poirier contributes three sweet-and-sour tunes, similar in style to Mitchell Akiyama’sIf Night Is a Weed and Day Grows Less. “La Danse du Plaisir” uses a voice-over from a documentary on mating rituals to good effect, although that will be lost on French-deaf listeners. Janek Schaefer closes the proceedings with a ten-minute offering, “Vasulka Vauban’s A Day in the Good Life,” a nebulous piece switching back and forth between murky analog-sounding drones and dense digital multi-textures. If anything, the assured taste displayed by Petit in previous installments of this collection ensures a quality compilation, and this volume doesn’t disappoint.

January was composed between January and May 2003. The inspiration for the cd came from my visit to Japan on a tour with 12k artists Richard Chartier and Sogar. We made many, many friends and it was one of the most enjoyable and inspirational travels i have taken in recent memory.

January attempts to loosely chronicle this trip by combining the stillness of looping passages with moving and non-repeating elements. a simple metaphor for our travels and the ideas of time standing still to experience a single moment forever. Our first morning in Tokyo there was a very heavy, yet gentle snowfall, a very vivid visual memory and the inspiration for the granular sounds in this recording. January utilizes many of the same practices and concepts of my work with loops and frozen sounds (such as on Stil.) but also adds layers of live instrumentation and voices. January features live, processed electric piano as well as vocal fragments, courtesy of Sawako. More pieces with voices were written in these sessions but did not appear on the final release.

This album was written at a time in my life of great changes and new beginnings and is dedicated to my son, Nicholas, who was born on February 19th, 2003.

This music grew out of a late November 2002 performance and studio improvisation in NYC. Deupree’s Stil. and Willits’ Folding, And The Tea had just been released on 12k, and a release party was held at Tonic in NYC. The show was recorded, then the pair set up a processing system in Deupree’s Brooklyn studio. It consisted of Willits’ guitar, folding through his own software system, and then resynthesized through Deupree’s Kyma processing. Jamming late into the night turned into hours of raw material. they edited the recordings into 10 track foundations, and finalized the tracks individually, 3000 miles apart. The final cd contains excerpts from the live recordings at Tonic in NYC, and their favorite finished pieces from the original studio collaboration. The result is a hybrid of Deupree’s keen timing and sensitivity to the microprocessing of sounds, and Willits’ folded guitar playing and flowing harmonic sensibilities. The cd drifts into new sonic territory for both artists, and establishes a foundation for Willits’ new melodic arrangements and deupree’s growing interest in live instrumentation.