Category: Music

Taylor Deupree and Marcus Fischer created their expansive debut In A Place Of Such Graceful Shapes (12k2021, 2011) over four days in a frigid, snow-covered New York only a few short months after they met. Since then they have toured together, photographed, and written music together keeping the collaborative, creative energy up at every opportunity, wherever they find themselves.

During a visit to the west coast in the summer of 2015, and after a long day in the studio creating, searching and ready to retire for the night, the two sat in tired silence contemplating the next day’s approach. Playing quietly in the background was a tape loop Fischer had made earlier, filling the sonic cracks in the dark room. After fifteen or twenty minutes went by, with the sound of this loop having transfixed them, the two looked at the each other and said “This is it.”

From there they formed a very focused conceptual process: Two artists, two mono tape loops and four acoustic instruments, nothing more. Creating one loop each of different lengths and recording the outputs of the reel-to-reel machines’ built-in speakers with microphones in the room, Deupree and Fischer started to craft their most restrained work yet, focusing on the raw beauty of such a limited system of creation.

The title Twine comes from the idea of the two tape loops as knots, as physical media, combining to form a single, more complex, piece. The seven tracks on the album are highly repetitive yet constantly shifting due to the asynchrony of the loops. All of the warm, tactile and dusty quality of the tape and vintage players is captured in the recordings and the listener can easily get lost in the slow, enveloping cycles. It was important for them to be surprised as they work, to not approach the album in the ways they had worked before where they knew what the outcome would sound like. The unexpected was a driving force behind the creation.

The instrumentation on Twine is simple – electric piano, bells, stringed instruments… With careful and deliberate physical manipulations the sounds is subtlely abstracted, as can be heard on “Buoy,” where the tape machine mechanics themselves join in the recording to create a piece suggestive of the abandoned dock the two photographed in Iceland a couple of years earlier as it quietly knocked against the cold winter shore. Imagery like this abounds through the tracks. Slow, haunting melodies under a layer of warm tape hiss and accidental physical sounds give the listener plenty of room for imagination, reflection and the stirring up of lost memories.

The intimacy of the tape loops combined with the lonliness of the sounds gives Twine a complexity beyond its simple form. Deupree and Fischer have created a intensely focused new work that draws upon all of their creative interactions since their 2010 debut.

In the wet heat of a Japanese summer, legendary musician Ryuichi Sakamoto was joined on stage by Taylor Deupree and the duo of Corey Fuller and Tomoyoshi Date, known as Illuha. The Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media hosted the event as part of their 10 year anniversary which also included a captivating installation by Sakamoto called Forest Symphony. The days surrounding the concert brought the artists together for food, talk and exploration. Informal but meaningful moods that prepared them for performing together.

The performance, an improvised set for piano, guitar, pump organ, and synthesizers, ended up affecting the artists in a deep way. The four, having never played all together before, were taken aback by the level of listening and restraint that flowed between them. The audience sat in a breathless silence, the music offering a respite from the thick July air. As the last hushed note faded into blackness the artists knew right away it had been a deep journey.

It is a fortunate event when a moment like this is captured, as this concert was ( recorded in high quality DSD). Perpetual, named for the eternal and ageless quality of the music, is presented in three movements that traverse from soft layers of synthesizer and processed guitar, to open, airy sections of prepared piano and silence, to finally coming to rest in a most hauntingly delicate lullaby of lonely piano, crackling found objects and field recordings and tones suspended like mists.

Perpetual not only surrounds us and stretches through time but collects that expanse into a single memory, a record of a brief moment where time stood still and four musicians merged into one.

“The best way to know people is to work with them, and that’s a very serious form of intimacy.” Robert Rauschenberg, 1977

Stephen Vitiello and Taylor Deupree’s Captiva consists of 3 pieces created while in residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s new Rauschenberg Residency Program at his estate and studio compound in Captiva, Florida. The first record, “From the Fish House,” captures a series of duets, recorded in a small guest house, perched above the bay of the inland waters of Captiva Island. Microphones were mounted inside and outside the room, allowing the environmental sounds of osprey, pelicans and water to naturally enter the mix. The primary instrumentation here is modular synthesizer, samples, electric guitar and found objects for percussion. If there’s a missing sound that could never be captured, its the sound of porpoises circling the Fish House, quietly breathing… a moment too fleeting to ever make it to tape, although attempted on many occasions.

While the first record was recorded during sunny afternoons, the tracks on the second record, “From The Main Studio” and “Last Piano (for RR)” were recorded during late night sessions in a vast reverberant work space, which the artist Robert Rauschenberg used as a multi-purpose production studio. In the far corner of the room, near giant doors opened to the quiet evening darkness, a baby grand piano sat, waiting to be played. Tracks on these pieces include the piano played with Ebows and prepared with forks and local beach shells as well as synthesizers and guitar. Many of the sounds were amplified and re-recorded in the room. The presence of Rauschenberg’s history and maybe welcoming ghost were always felt… if possibly not heard.

Captiva is presented as a beautifully realized double-10” album graced with a pair of Polaroid photographs from the artists taken of the Fish House and its surrounding waters. The audio work and their photography was shown at the Rauschenberg gallery space in Chelsea in New York City in 2013. This is the duo’s first full-length collaborative recording following a series of performances, a song recorded with Ryuichi Sakamoto and a multi-channel sound piece for the touring exhibition, With Hidden Noise, organized by Independent Curators International.

Lost & Compiled is a collection of early mixes of songs from 2007-2013 as well as some previously unreleased works. The concept for the release came from the idea that songs that Deupree writes go through so many permutations that by the time they are released they have left behind a trail of ghosts. Sometimes when he goes back to early versions of songs he will hear something more relaxed, free, and less perfect… a point in the song’s life where the stress of finishing it or the polish of a “final” mix hasn’t yet taken place.

The songs on this album are just that; tracks in earlier states of completion or entirely different versions that never made the final cut. Lost & Compiled is an interesting look at what gets left behind and buried. Mixes that are no less powerful and often quite a bit more vulnerable, than the final cuts.

Lost & Compiled is a CD that Taylor Deupree has been wanting to make for years and, finally, as part of his 2014 Japan tour (with Illuha, Stephan Mathieu and Federico Durand) it has come to light. The album was debuted at the venues of the tour and in an attempt to keep the release on the quiet side will only receive a small amount of Japanese distribution and otherwise only be available in the 12k shop and not through 12k’s regular distribution channels.

Isolation, solitude, contemplation. These are the themes that discreetly weave their way through Disappearance, the first collaboration album between 12k’s Taylor Deupree and pioneering electronic composer and pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto. The two began their musical dialogue in 2006 when Deupree was invited to remix a song from Sakamoto’s album Chasm. “World Citizen” was the song and it sparked continued collaboration as Deupree contributed to two of Sakamoto’s activist projects: Chain Music and KizunaWorld (as a trio with Sakamoto and Stephen Vitiello.) With the convenience of both artists living in New York they kept in touch, released music on 12k (Willits + Sakamoto’s Ocean Fire) and, in April of 2012, performed live together at John Zorn’s club The Stone. It was this concert that planted the seeds for Disappearance.

The initial tracks for Disappearance were recorded at Sakamoto’s studio in New York City during rehersals for the April concert. The two immediately entered the same sonic mindframe that lead to hours of concentrated, hushed music. Sakamoto’s piano playing, both traditional and prepared, emerged as perhaps some of his most beautifully sparse in recent years, letting the sound of the room and shuffle of chairs take an active roll in the recording. Only the most minimum of essential notes, accentuated by silences and the scraping of the piano’s strings, plays alongside Deupree’s nuanced passages, created with analogue synthesizers, strings, and found objects. These warm, human tones became the means of communication between the two artists who effortlessly created a musical language.

The five tracks that make up Disappearance are delicate and composed, however, they’re not all peacefulness and placidity. Micro-tuned edges, bursts of noise, percussive prepared piano and the warble of old reel-to-reel tape keep the mood grounded and warm, turning it inward and asking the listener to reflect on their path. “Curl To Me,” the album’s final piece, is highlighted by the sounds of Ichiko Aoba, a major up-and-coming singer/songwriter from Tokyo. Both Sakamoto and Deupree have recently worked with Aoba in Japan and wanted her presence felt on the album. Emphasizing the solitude and stillness of the recordings, Aoba provided both her voice and the almost disturbingly intimate sound of her own heartbeat.

Disappearance is a soundtrack for holding breaths. Sakamoto and Deupree lay down worn roads, but don’t leave signs, for a journey woven together by the quiet celebration of the fragility of nature and life.