Category: Music

Sounds and arrangements by Taylor Deupree
Mixed and mastered at 12k
Published by 12k Music (ASCAP)

Artwork by Herbert Pfostl
Design by Sprflxgrfzm

Deupree describes the album title “as if there’s always something about my music that’s like a murmur”, resulting in a murmuring effect when pronouncing the names of each track. Mur is a personal journey through the challenging year that 2020 has been.

Taylor Deupree is an American musician and mastering engineer based just outside of New York. As a former member of the American electronic band Prototype 909, Deupree has had numerous collaborations with artists such as Ryuichi Sakamoto, Stephen Vitiello, Alva Noto and Marcus Fischer. Curating 12k, a New-York based music label, is another aspect of Deupree’s career and brought together over one hundred releases since its beginnings in 1997. Having some similar artists in our catalog (Federico Durand, Will Samson and Steinbüchel for example), it’s safe to say that Deupree’s new release through Dauw will be in good company.

“Winter hasn’t completely loosened its grip here, but the light has changed and the sun rises just slightly higher in the sky each morning. While I will miss the snow-quieted atmosphere, brought about by the beautiful, monochromatic landscape, part of me, especially now, longs for change. Visible, forward-moving change.

Within my small sonic world I’ve urged things along, creating a time I look forward to, a few months from now, when things will be different.

Chorus (Dusk/Dawn) is a continuation of the idea I put forth in Snow (Dusk/Dawn) (2010) that found me responding, musically, to my immediate natural surroundings. But here, on Chorus, I have manufactured this landscape. Created and imagined one with highly non-organic means, rushing the change of seasons and, despite going against the core foundation of so much of my work, looking to speed up time rather than stop it.”

Taylor Deupree, March 4, 2021

In Chorus (Dusk/Dawn) Deupree utilizes a single eurorack synthesizer oscillator to create the sound of the dawn chorus that surrounds him in the summer months at his studio in New York. This din of insects (mostly crickets, katydids and cicadas) is both calming and relentless, at times reaching a deafening state as it overtakes the sonic landscape each morning and evening. The purely synthetic source of Deupree’s creation highlights the urge to imagine and manufacture this natural phenomenon, during a season in which it has not yet arrived. Musical layers interweave and accompany the “insects” in the form of lilting, generative sine waves, a sonically pure tone intending to mesh with, rather than contrast, this imagined dawn.

Like all artists who have been working through and processing life during a global pandemic it can be difficult not to take one’s situation into account when creating. While I did not actively set out to write an “isolation” or “pandemic” piece of music I was, for some reason, drawn toward the idea of being lost at sea, a feeling many are probably experiencing at a time like this. Not in a life-threatening, panicked sense, but in a more mysterious, foggy, or even calming way of feeling. A sense of letting go, of floating, but not knowing where you are, like a child who closes her eyes while swinging high on a playground swing. I suppose as with much of my music I was after the balance on that line of fragility between the insecure and the comforting.

I have spent a lot of time in my life in a canoe, on lakes and rivers. In the very early fog-covered mornings, or the dusks of evening searching for a place to camp for the night. Canoes are peculiar vessels. A way of traveling solo or with only one or two others into hidden areas not often seen from land. They are very sensitive to balance and weight distribution. Standing up in a canoe is not always recommended.

It is these characteristics of the canoe that influenced this piece of music. Something with which I am deeply familiar yet still teetering on the unknown, and, literally, attempting to keep balance. With “Canoe” I hope to instil a sense of solitude, loneliness, and the hushed searching for and unknown something, just out of reach.

This Valley Of Old Mountains quietly creates the folklore of an imaginary land. From a hemisphere apart, Taylor Deupree and Federico Durand share simple sounds with complex stories. Their music balances an edge between translucency and exploration, focusing on obscurity, repetition and a shared fascination of the mountains between them.