Category: Music

This release collects recordings of live performances by Taylor Deupree in Bern (CH), York (UK), Hiroshima & Yamaguchi (JP), as well as an unknown location. It focuses on the most quiet, drawn-out and linear moments of these concerts. Live1:Mapping is the first in a series of audio diaries that recollect far-away places, sleepless nights and the warm comfort of sound.

The recordings were done direct from the stage mixer to a portable digital recorder. Other than cropping the selected area and mastering, no additional edits or sounds have been added.

May is the latest collaboration between New York composers Taylor Deupree and Kenneth Kirschner.

Recorded on May 9, 2008 at the OFFF Festival in Lisbon, Portugal, the album represents the first available live recording of Deupree and Kirschner’s concert performances.

Continuing in the direction of their acclaimed post_piano series, Deupree and Kirschner’s live work explores the intersection between piano and state-of-the-art digital music technology.

For this performance, Deupree and Kirschner took an even more experimental approach than they have in past concerts:  sitting side by side at a single grand piano, they both played piano and both played laptop, with Kirschner playing the keys of the piano and Deupree directly manipulating the strings inside, even as they both shared the duties of electronic processing and sample manipulation.

The result is a rich and complex mixture of digital and acoustic timbres that breaks new ground in their ongoing exploration of the role of the piano in contemporary electronic music.

To order Sea Last, please view this PDF OF AVAILABLE IMAGES and purchase the edition in our online shop. In your PayPal order comments please let us know which original image you want in your book, or email us separately with the request.

Ripples Of Sea Last

The ocean asserts a temporality on each landmass it comes in contact with. Whether perpendicular walls of rock eroded over centuries or tidal beaches that are replenished numerous times across a day, the ocean’s interaction with land is one that creates a cycle based around time and erasure.

Origins of this understanding often start with childhood sand castles on the shore – hours of work in creation of some epic architectural feat are lost in moments by one overzealous wave scouring its way up the beach. In that instant, time spent is reclaimed by the sea – the slate of the shore washed clear, like a memory erased.

Memory is one of the key themes American photographer and composer Taylor Deupree explores through Sea Last. Like many American youngsters, Deupree’s summers were peppered with visits to the Florida coastline where he became fascinated by the ebb and flow of the tides – the constant state of flux, as beaches dotted with footprints, engravings and debris were smoothed over creating effortlessly rejuvenated surfaces.

Sea Last collects images across five days (April 24-28 2008) on a beach in Venice near his childhood holiday home. For Deupree it is a reflection on an ever-transmutable environment that holds both a deep fascination and personal memories for him. Sea Last also eludes to another contradiction of the sea – one concerned with perspective.

Once we pass beyond the shore, the vastness of the water’s surface suggests something of a ‘stillness’ perhaps even a ‘timelessness’. It is a space so epic that it becomes impossible to survey in detail. As one peers out to the horizon or from the window of a plane at high altitude the movement of individual waves are lost – something proposed by American Romantic poet James Russell Lowell who wrote “There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea…”.

Sea Last raises a question of perspective – specifically where we choose to place ourselves as ‘viewers’. Indeed, the camera serves an important function, the film medium itself shaping the viewer’s position. Rather than utilizing a more documentary style approach, Deupree’s Polaroid back Holga – a cheap but unique camera with a low clarity plastic lens – offers a somewhat obscured and cloudy impression of the Florida coast. Within the images nothing is clear or sharp, and instantly they produce a sensation of ‘natsukashi, the Japanese word that refers to sentimental memory (usually with a sense of fondness), and ultimately their blur engenders a ubiquity that recalls the beachside photos we have all taken – familiar yet distant.

Unlike Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes works or Takashi Homma’s New Waves, Deupree tends towards a more personal, subjective and uncontrolled impression of his chosen environment. He takes in the entirety of the shore, from the dunes to the beginning of the sea building a memory-scape we are invited to explore. The 238 selected images, ask the viewer to fill in the detail of the image, edit or embrace the blurs, flares and dimmed corners – and in the process invest some of their own memory in the instant of each Polaroid. Thus Deupree’s subjectivity is mediated by the film stock itself to allow for the viewer’s experiences to become projected into the series.

Equally there’s a mimetic quality to Sea Last’s audio component recorded in June 2008. The textures generated create a washing sweep as sound parcels are moved across the stereo field, their motion creating a gentle lull that suggests tidal flows and the shimmering qualities of blown dune grasses.

In each Sea Last produced, there is one original Polaroid image, making each copy unique and by default limiting the entire edition to 238.

– Lawrence English

Due to continued demand for this title and the fact that the initial pressing of 1,500 copies sold out in less than 6 months, 12k is re-issuing Northern in an expanded package with re-mixed and re-mastered audio.

the audio:
Not content to merely order a re-pressing of the same masters on hand at the cd manufacturer, Taylor Deupree set out to create what he calls the “director’s cut” of one of the most important cds in his catalog. The idea was to open the now-2-year-old computer files to re-mix and re-master the tracks. Of course over the course of years computers change, formats change, and Deupree found himself faced with missing plug-ins, errored sound files and other oddities that made working with the files difficult. What first seemed like roadblocks turned into a mission to work with what was there and re-do what was not. The result is a Northern that will, on the surface, seem quite similar to the original, however listeners will hear new sounds, extended endings, shortened endings and most of all, an overall mix that presents these works with a new clarity and spaciousness. Mastering in the analog domain has given the work a new found sense of delicacy and detail.

the package:
A heavyweight cardboard wallet with debossed typography on the front cover. Inside are two pockets, one for the CD and one for a 24-page booklet of photography, credits, and lots of white space. All printing, as with the original, is in black and white.

the original press release:
The inspiration behind Northern (including its music, title and photography) comes from Deupree’s recent relocation from the heart of urban activity in Brooklyn to the tranquility of the forest in upstate New York. Inspired by nature and the winter during which it was created, Northern, like much of his recent work, explores Deupree’s interest in stillness and a slowed sense of time. Through quiet textures, subtle movements, faint loops and echoes, it was his goal to create the type of music that comes naturally to him while also highlighting the input from his dramatic new surroundings.

In contrast to the brazen repetition found on Stil., Northern more ephemeral approach to Deupree’s theme comes from looking at the stillness found outside of his studio windows: large, looming boulders, the softness of snow, and the hushed whisper of wind and fallen leaves; it is a world of countless tiny movements so active that an implied stillness results from the din it creates.

Deupree’s earthbound ideas in the album are rooted in his choice of sounds and studio practices. His now-signature Kyma manipulations are still prominent, but they have been applied to improvised electric piano, melodica, guitar, and field recordings using techniques picked up from his experimental/pop collaboration with Eisi (Every Still Day, Noble Records, Japan, 2005). A careful balance is kept through the layering of synthetic source tones of basic waveforms and long, drawn-out, fragile swells. Northern is melodic, warm and introspective, forming a bed of sound that is simultaneously quiet and noisy, structured and unsettled, looping and chaotic.

Deupree has dedicated Northern to his closest friend of his teenage years, Bryan Charles Strniste, with whom he first started experimenting in electronic music over 20 years ago. Deupree’s relocation to a nearby area much like the one where he grew up spurred memories of those days of early musical playfulness. Thus, Northern became highly personal and nostalgic while at the same time breaking into new territory for Deupree, echoing the changes in his personal life.

Northern is the first solo CD from Taylor Deupree since 2004’s January (Spekk, Japan), and the first on 12k since the seminal Stil. (12k, 2002).

Touching back upon techniques he explored in the mid-1990’s deupree utilizes multiple time signatures, odd delays, feedbacks, and repetition to play with time and rhythm. The minimal aesthetic is very much in line with what he is doing today, but the stylings are decidedly techno.