Category: Music

Shoals (Edition) is a companion release to Taylor Deupree’s 2010 full-length CD Shoals. This limited edition 7” record has a shortened version of “A Fading Found” (from the album) on Side A and a B-Side called “Sere.” While the 7” format only allows for brief works – and in this case extracted from much longer compositions – Edition creates intimate and physical vignettes into these highly acoustic and tactile recordings.

Shoals (Edition) is packaged in 12k’s 7” style with a heavy chipboard sleeve letterpressed with dark green ink.

Transience, ephemerality. There is beauty in things that don’t last. Taylor Deupree’s Snow (Dusk, Dawn), a multimedia project incorporating sound and photography, is based around 63 photographs taken with expired polaroid film. This particular film produces images cast with other-worldly blueish hues and almost immediately begin to fade; losing color, to deep browns, and then finally, within 24 hours after being shot, to complete black.

Deupree’s work is often inspired by nature, particularly the winterscapes near his home and studio in rural New York. With the polaroid film in hand, which he knew would capture only a fleeting image, he shot images during the first heavy snowfall of the winter of 2009, at dusk, in the setting sun; nothing was to last, the snow, the image, the day. The next morning, barely at sunrise, he set out again to finish the film, in a dawn that wasn’t going to last.

As quickly as he could, following each photo session, Deupree scanned the polaroid prints, capturing the first white snow in ghostly blue before the pictures faded to black. Each of these scanned images is printed and displayed next to its original, black polaroid counterpart in the package along with the cd. Each copy of this edition of 63 is thus rendered unique, each with a different print and polaroid.

For the music portion of the project there is also contrast, transience, and decay. A fragile melodic loop, distressed by surface noise, struggles to keep its repetitive flow over a quiet and languid 18 minutes as it subtly, but constantly, loses ground and eventually becomes fragmented and falls away amongst the elements that surrounded it.

Snow (Dusk, Dawn) captures the essence of what much of Deupree’s work is about: imperfection, time, and memory. He uses both high- and low-tech means of creating rich works that scrape away at the surface of digital sterility. Avoiding the con- trolled manipulation offered by computers he prefers natural and unpredictable processes to add depth and texture to this work. Outdated film, cheap cameras, dust and leaking light effect his photographs while guitars, found percussion, old analog synthesizers and recordings of falling snow provide the soundtrack to a moment in time that comes and goes like dawn.

This edition is being presented at the NADiff Gallery in Tokyo, Japan on April 15th as part of Deupree’s Polaroid photography show, Unseen.

The edition contains: 3″ CD – Original Polaroid print – Color print of pre-faded Polaroid image – Letterpress card.

A PDF file of the entire edition can be viewed HERE.

Savvas Ysatis and Taylor Deupree were at it again in Deupree’s country studio, about two years after the creation of 2007’s The Sleeping Morning EP. They gave themselves one week to see what they could create with the studio as a blank canvas, and the two emerged with Hourglass, four songs of carefully crafted pop-infused ambient music destined for release on 12” vinyl.

Hourglass follows in The Sleeping Morning’s footsteps with two instrumental pieces and two vocal songs created with a multitude of acoustic instruments, analog synthesizers and very little computer aided programming. The idea of treating the computer as a tape deck instead of a programming device was vital to their process as they surrounded themselves in the studio with as many noise-making objects as possible, shunning nothing if it could be used in interesting ways.

“Clouds” opens the A-Side with a crisp and spacious arrangement fueled by Ysatis’ airy vocals and a warm, driving harmonica line over a bed of bass synths and looping autoharp. Utilizing room tones, microphones and treated guitar, “Hourglass” is a distant, longing and highly textured escape into ambient territory that the duo knows so well. Side B opens with the 2nd “poppish” song, “Like Ice On A Summer’s Day”, aptly titled for both its glistening and warm textures driven by acoustic guitar and the spacey swirls of a Jupiter-8. “Somewhere On Earth” closes out the EP in an organic mood where the whole studio becomes a live, swirling world of improvised instruments and playful experimentation.

Hourglass is the much anticipated next step for Ysatis and Deupree who have been collaborating since 1994 and have been known for embracing many different genres with their critically acclaimed catalog of releases.

The Hourglass 12” is limited to 400 numbered copies and comes packaged in a beautifully printed full color jacket. Each copy includes a coupon with a code to download both Flac and MP3 versions of the songs. Additionally, the EP will be available from 12k’s usual digital retailers.

‘Transcriptions’, a collaborative work by Stephan Mathieu and Taylor Deupree, contains 8 tracks of music that is both historic, decayed, angelic and revolving, while also existing in warmth, purity, and transcendence through acoustic instruments, and vintage synthesizer.

Delving deeply into the history of the earliest recording methods through mechanical phonographs, Stephan Mathieu created a method using wax-cylinders, the predecessor of records, as well as 78s, which have a larger frequency range, to create his music through playback of these pieces of musical history. With a setup consisting of playing the cylinders through two portable gramophones, and then sending them directly into the computer by microphone, Mathieu was able to record the sounds, and perform software processing in realtime, rendering a resulting flow of deteriorated angelic elegance, decomposed beauty, and reborn awakenings.

From this result, Taylor Deupree worked with the recordings, adding acoustic instruments and vintage synthesizer; adding-to, while still maintaining the physicality of the 78s, opening the range of the tracks through unalloyed analog contributions. Upon first listening, it might be thought that the contributions of Taylor Deupree were merely additions to original material, but when listening further, once the music has breathed openly, it can be heard actually how much the cylinder recordings of Stephan Mathieu shape the open pathways of Deupree’s acoustics, allowing for a breadth of incredible range. Not merely a compliment, but a modern counterpart.

Through nearly 48 minutes of music, self-described as warm and enveloping, these sounds represent the pivotal movements of the unique, the saturated, and the exploratory, all colliding in what may be sometimes a wave of revolving fuzz, swirling melodies of the supernatural and the human, the delicate echoes of single revolutions, and gentle plucks of the guitar. It is both a conversation, and a translation of both sides. Transcription, after all, means notating the unnotated.

The result of the century-apart sources combined with the methodology and talent of these two leading experimentalists creates an immutable, impressing magnetism, while still balancing so gently on the vibrations of the decayed, and the frail humanity of the past.

“On one particularly cold and rainy winter day, tired and a bit down, I sat on my studio floor and surrounded myself with a pile of small instruments, my acoustic guitar, and my looping pedals. Pixel, one of my cats, was sleeping next to me as I began to create a warm bed of drones and small noises in an attempt to warm the room and my spirits.

As fate would have it, during the very same day, I had laid out all of the steps before me needed to finally bring 12k into the world of vinyl, lining up manufacturers, printers, and design ideas. It seemed perhaps more than coincidence, then, that I had actually been sitting down to write what would become the two short pieces on this 7”. It only took a look at the weather outside the window and then at a dusty piece of vinyl still sitting on the turntable since autumn for me to know immediately the title and feel of these pieces.

Created in a short number of days, “Weather” and “Worn” actually mark the first recordings I have done solely with acoustic instruments and a minimum of effect processing. Although not entirely planned, these two pieces are quite fittingly warm and a bit noisy, scratchy and tactile. Each track is based around a drone and then extended by further explorations around the same note. There is a stillness and feeling of tension which then give way to clarity. When the work is played loudly, it becomes ever-present, yet is gentle and calm when played softly. There is a sense of struggle between the weather and my mood, between the technology and imperfection…and only a run-out groove in the vinyl to keep these pieces from fading to complete silence.

During the cutting of “Worn” I realized that the 45 RPM record sounded beautifully hazy and languid on 33, so I set out to create an extended version of the track for the digital only release. Inspired by my Stil. album, I looped a portion of “Worn”, transposed the pitch and speed to match a 33-rpm record and let it run for 23 minutes. This cannot fit on a side of 7″ vinyl, so it became a digital-only track. 23 minutes is an arbitrary length… really it could run on for hours.”

Taylor Deupree
March 2nd, 2009

Weather & Worn launches the first in an ongoing series of 7” releases by 12k. Each will be packaged in a recycled chipboard jacket and printed with a minimum of plant-based inks. The clear 7” vinyl is protected by a matte-black sleeve embossed with a small 12k logo.