Taylor Deupree - The Digital Age

In search of identity

Taylor Deupree began making electronic music at a very young age, in the mid-80s, driven by his passion for the new wave of Factory Records and the ambient music of Brian Eno. The young musician, born and raised in Brooklyn, soon developed a strong interest in music software and the more experimental side of electronics. In 1985 he was given his first synth, with which he began learning the secrets of electronic sound. More than 20 cassettes of recordings from that period exist, but for now Deupree has no intention of releasing them.

In the late 80s Taylor experienced the rave era firsthand. At just twenty-two he began recording for one of the most prominent labels of the emerging ambient-trance scene, Instinct Records.
Before using his given name, Taylor Deupree, he chose to adopt many pseudonyms to release his music under: Prototype 909, Human Mesh Dance, SETI, Escape Thank, ARC, Futique, Unit Park and Drum Komputer. The New York musician himself explained the reason in an old interview from 1999: "Every project had its own well-defined identity, and even before writing anything I knew how I'd release it. For instance, if me and Savvas (Ysatis, ed.) were doing something techno, then it would come out under ARC. If instead we were working on an ambient track, then we'd release it as SETI. If I was working with Dietrich (Schoenemann, ed.), then the techno tracks were by Unit Park. And if Jason (Szostek, ed.) was involved too, then it would be Prototype 909."

12k

In 1997, after leaving Instinct, Taylor Deupree founded his own label, 12k, abandoning the techno of his early days to focus on the experimental side of the electronic universe. "In 1996 I was negotiating my contract with Silent, and after months, or maybe a year, of being messed around, I finally said goodbye to them and decided to release the CD on my own (the album in question was thesecretnumbertwelve). Before that I'd worked for a few years at Instinct Records in New York, and I'd formed an idea of how a record label should operate. Besides, I was already known as an artist for having released a few CDs on Instinct, so it was relatively easy to release and sell the record myself. It's funny because the "twelve" in thesecretnumbertwelve has nothing to do with the name 12k, it's just a coincidence, even though there is a kind of connection, as is only natural. That's emblematic of how I work: I move on impulse and spontaneous inspiration, which often leads to interesting developments. 12k never had any long-term plans. I usually just let things happen."

In ten years of activity, 12k has released more than 40 works by artists of the caliber of Dan Abrams, Christopher Willits and Sogar, Tetsu Inoue, helping to define the glitch sound that, in those same years, artists like Ryoji Ikeda, Noto, Oval, and in general all the names on Germany's Raster Noton were putting forward.
To diversify its musical output, over the years 12k has launched the sister labels Line, Term and Happy. The first was mainly used to release joint works with his friend Richard Chartier, a companion on many adventures (including a performance at the first Sensoralia at the Palladium in Rome a few years ago). "It was 1998 when Richard got interested in 12k and contacted me. It turned out we had quite a few interests in common, and so, after talking and talking, we decided to collaborate. Richard wanted to complete his series of CDs, which I felt weren't quite in line with what 12k was doing at the time, and so, on one of those spontaneous impulses I mentioned earlier, we decided to start a new label, Line, to release his work and that of other artists similar to him."

Happy was created to release less experimental works, more tied to Taylor's passion for Japanese pop. Term, meanwhile, is a netlabel that has made available unreleased work by artists of the caliber of Sogar, Stephan Mathieu and Motion. Japan seems to be a constant presence in the New York musician's interests. "The first 12k releases were my own records or those of my friends in New York, but I also had friends living all over the world, and I started releasing music by some of them. But things happened very naturally, I never set out thinking about any particular scene. I only release music that I like, and it happens to be made here in New York just as much as anywhere else in the world. I see the scene as something global."

Nothing has changed about Deupree's spirit over all these years: "I'm very satisfied with the work I've done. I'm very happy and also proud to be able to say that with 12k I continue on with the same spirit I started with. I've always wanted to keep the label small, to allow myself a slow but perceptible sonic evolution. I think I've achieved my goals without ever having to make any kind of unnecessary compromise. 12k turned ten in January 2007, and I'll do everything I can to keep working the way I always have. It might sound strange to hear that I don't want the label to get big, but that's how it is. I don't need it to grow, and this gives me the freedom to do what I want, the way I want, without having to make concessions of any kind." If anything, what's changed is my view of live performance: "I think it's hard to present this kind of music live, and above all to make it interesting for the listener. I don't want to get into the age-old debate about experimental music concerts and laptop-only sets, but there's certainly nothing spectacular or exciting to look at for someone attending the shows. I'm actually fine with that, because it means people focus on the music. I don't care if people watch me while I play, I just want them to listen to me. For my part, I try to make every show interesting by incorporating elements of improvisation into my music, and possibly mistakes too. The flip side is that some of my shows end up only half working out. But at least they're not all planned out in advance. Also, I start putting together each show a few days before the performance, so that every show is unique and unrepeatable. And that gives the audience a bit of satisfaction in knowing they're witnessing something that most likely has never been played before and will never be repeated again. I'm slowly trying to play more and more instruments live during my shows. Over the last two years I've often brought a small keyboard on stage with me, to play certain passages and manipulate them in real time. This week I'll be bringing a keyboard and a synthesizer to my shows, in addition to my laptop. I'd also like to bring a guitar and the Kyma system, to improvise a fully live show. But to do that I first need to program a robust environment with Kyma."

Out of New York

In 2005 Taylor Deupree moved house, leaving Brooklyn to go live in the countryside. His music was affected by it. The collaboration with the Japanese group Eisi marked a turning point in the American musician's career. "Collaborating with Eisi was a wonderful experience. Working with a group of three musicians and then blending the sounds of their acoustic instruments with my electronic equipment was very innovative, and exciting for me at the same time. Recently I got in touch with an artist in Japan, a singer who usually plays indie-shoegaze kind of stuff, and I'd really love to collaborate with them. I don't know what will come out of it, or even whether the collaboration will actually happen, but I'm very interested in testing myself with something drastically different from what I usually play."
Tired of synthetic sounds? "It's mainly just an evolution. I played synthetic and digital music for quite a few years, and it seemed interesting to start playing with different sonorities. I never want to stop and do the same things for too long, so I always try to change things up. I think one day I'll go back to making music with a more synthetic sound, as a reaction to the organic things I'm doing now. Certainly, for Northern I was heavily inspired both by the sounds of nature that have surrounded me since I moved away from Brooklyn, and by the dedication to my friend Bryan. So there's definitely a warm sound, and a lot of feeling too, in the record. After living in New York for so long, I really came to appreciate nature… and inevitably my music started to reflect that. My sound is also influenced by the technology I use: two or three years ago I bought a Kyma system (software+hardware) that truly makes my music shine during live shows, and also when I play certain instruments on a record… so I've started using it more and more in my music. It's really a beautiful piece of gear."

Between 2006 and 2009 Taylor Deupree never stopped collaborating with artists from every corner of the planet. His records are often snapshots and accounts of events and encounters. Specification.Fifteen is a collaboration with fellow musician Richard Chartier released on Line. The piece was commissioned by the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC for a retrospective on the renowned Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto (Seascapes). For the occasion the two musicians performed in front of a large panoramic window overlooking the city skyline. A striking show, underscored by the two Americans' quiet, seemingly motionless music.

The three tracks on the EP Landing, on the other hand, push even further the organic drift of Deupree's electronics begun with "Northern". Music built on electric guitars and old analog keyboards that shimmer around some of the sunniest melodies the American musician has ever written.

Along the same lines as the collaboration with Chartier is the one with Christopher Willits, released in 2007 under the title Listening Garden. Again released by Line, 12k's sister label. Elements of musique concrète merge with the two musicians' discreet improvisations and with sounds recorded in real time inside the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media in Yamaguchi, Japan, in June 2004.

Before the end of 2007 Deupree released another collaboration, this time with his old friend Savvas Ysatis, known for his techno records on Tresor: The Sleeping Morning is perhaps the most pop record Deupree has released in the new millennium, and the thanks to good food and grappa found inside the CD booklet give a good sense of the friendly atmosphere in which the album's five tracks were born.

2008 opens with the release of two live albums: the first, Live in Melbourne, is a split with Seaworthy and Solo Andata; the second, May, is the recording of a concert held with Kenneth Kirschner during the OFFF Festival in Lisbon, on May 9, 2008. The two musicians know each other inside out, and their improvisations are so finely calibrated they seem synchronized. A single track, thirty-six minutes long, that reaches the peaks of intensity of Taylor Deupree's best music.
Sea Last is a very important release for Deupree. Musically it's a piece of just 18 minutes that doesn't add anything new to the American musician's palette. The real highlight is the packaging: a photo book of a beach in Venice, Florida, where Deupree had vacationed since childhood. Photos taken at dawn, with the beach deserted, carrying the sense that year after year something was changing. The release is limited to just 238 copies and sold for no less than 135 dollars.

After another live release, Live1: Mapping, sold in early 2009 only in digital format (mp3 and flac), Taylor Deupree released a clear 7" in the spring of that same year, Wetaher And Worn, proof of how the physical format for his music is both irrelevant and yet necessary at the same time.

Summer brings the collaboration with Stephan Mathieu, a further step into the analog universe. Mathieu built a system to give voice to old cylinders, the forerunners of gramophones, using specific microphones. The sounds captured this way are then processed via computer without losing their original decayed qualities: a quality of "angelic elegance", to borrow the words of Will Long of Celer. Deupree then added to the sounds of these transcriptions those of his analog synthesizers, creating enveloping drones and light rhythmic ripples. The result is mesmerizing, and not too far removed from the disintegrating loops of William Basinski.

Before the end of 2012 Taylor Deupree released Faint, a collection of ambient music that continues the process of decaying the digital structures of his compositions. The American musician's sound has, over the years, grown ever warmer and more enveloping: "Dreams Of Stairs", the second of the five tracks on the album, is a circular mantra that drags itself through a cotton-lined labyrinth. The attention to detail is obsessive: at times it feels like you're listening to leaves breathing. Taylor Deupree has learned to shape silence into invisible sighs. 
On the same wavelength is the fine collaboration with Australian Cameron Webb (aka Seaworthy), Wood, Winter, Hollow. With an acoustic guitar run through a mountain of digital filters, an electric guitar stripped of any effects, and a metallophone borrowed from Sigur Ros, Cameron and Deupree crafted melodies capable of warming up a room within seconds. And beneath everything they left a teeming bed of field recordings, describing the passage of time with an incredible richness of detail.
Taylor Deupree's music is by now light years away from the synthetic architectures of his early work.

In 2013, the owner of 12k met Ryuichi Sakamoto. The first contacts between the two musicians date back a few years, but it was a concert organized by John Zorn at his New York club The Stone that brought them together in person. On the evening of April 27, 2012, the seeds of their future collaboration were sown. One of the five tracks on Disappearance, "This Window", comes directly from that concert. The other four tracks were recorded in Sakamoto's studio in New York, the city where both musicians live. The host played piano and also handled some electronic instruments. Deupree, meanwhile, brought along some synthesizers, an acoustic guitar, and a few old magnetic tapes.
"Jyaku", the opening track, immediately reveals the project's strengths and weaknesses: Deupree arranges his characteristic small acoustic orchestra, scraping percussion and guitar strings, trying to lay the groundwork for a story to tell; Sakamoto initially just lays down a dark drone, then starts distilling clusters of notes like morning dewdrops. A melancholy, intimate atmosphere immediately takes over, becoming something of a throughline for the whole album—so much so that we find ourselves with only minimal variations on the second track, "Frozen Fountain", where the atmosphere becomes even more rarefied.
The recording at The Stone is telling: Sakamoto improvises, playing a handful of notes that sound like they could come from one of his film scores; Deupree tries to build, with noise and drone fragments, a paved avenue for the Japanese musician's improvisation. But the two seem to truly meet only well past the halfway mark of the piece, after tiptoeing around each other, each in their own world, showing great mutual respect but also an inability to find a shared language. The evocative closing track, "Curl To Me", is enriched by the ultra-vivid vocals of Ichiko Aoba, who had already collaborated with both Sakamoto and Deupree.

Time becomes a loop

For several years Deupree's delicate experiments intertwined with those of other illustrious collaborators, as if he wanted to avoid the spotlight in order to converse freely with other, similarly quiet sonic manipulations. The return to a solo dimension comes in 2017 with Somi, whose hardbound booklet collects the abstract photographs that inspired its musical counterpart.
Reducing the instrumentation to the bare essentials – an electric piano, a DX7 synth and a glockenspiel – Deupree embraces acoustic sound and distills it into countless small gems recorded on a portable cassette recorder. These parallel tracks are then strung together with manually triggered loops, creating spontaneous intersections that immediately come across as the result of a careful, aleatoric process.
In a manner similar to molecules reacting with one another, these sound cells repopulate a still-raw, fertile ground, ideally represented by the faint hiss of tape running between the reels. Thus, as if on a laboratory slide, the most recent generative modules of Brian Eno sketch out an unprecedented communion with the melancholy polaroids of Benoît Pioulard.

Taylor Deupree's latest musical project, Ohio, sees him consolidate his partnership with his friend Corey Fuller, a bond already forged back in the days of Between. 

The two musicians debuted by recording three sides of a double twelve-inch, "Upward, Broken, Always", split into nine tracks of stellar music: synthesizers, filters, but also acoustic and electric guitars, accompanied by mountains of feedback, and vocals. Searching for new paths outside the canonical ambient sound (at which both musicians excel), Deupree and Fuller even ended up reinterpreting Damien Jurado's Ohio.

In 2021 Deupree devoted himself, with the new LP Mur, both to processing the grief of his father's recent passing and to his own personal take on the ambient pianism of Brian Eno, with five long, dreamlike tracks that clearly recall that expansive world of music for environments.
Whether it's music for airports or for installations, the quality of sound from this student of Eno's - now a master in his own right for a new generation of musicians from all over the world - is undeniable. Piano notes scatter across a calm sea of synths and background white noise, in just over forty minutes of emotional stasis that induces reflection and tends to go beyond Eno's idea of music not meant to be listened to, becoming instead music to listen to in order to stop, even for the briefest moment, the pointless frenzy of daily life.
Stasis and quiet for a music that never seeks a recognizable melody, but is constantly a kind of primordial soup of abstract notes filling both the surrounding space and the mind of anyone wishing to escape the daily race toward meaninglessness. The opening and closing tracks ("Mir" and "Mar") are the longest and most successful, the first typically Eno-esque, the second finally giving way to restless electronic distortion.
Deupree confirms himself as a leading figure on today's electronic scene, staying true to the principles that have always defined his career, principles he laid out in his famous 12 rules. In this case I'd say rule 8 is the one that best describes "Mur" ("Never try to innovate, be true to yourself and innovation might come").

2022 proved to be a particularly prolific year for Taylor Deupree, whose label 12k released, right at the start of the year and digital-only, two long pieces recorded in 2013 for two photography exhibitions by David Sylvian ("Abandon" and "Hope"). The first of the two tracks, "Too Close To Being Far Away From Everything", follows the American musician's classic dynamics: a handful of analog sounds looped and laid over an ultra-romantic drone. The second track, "Reflections On An Inland Sea", is in some ways less melancholic and nocturnal: a guitar tries to bring light through the morning fog.

"Harbor" on LAAPSE is dazzling at times. Skeins of sound that come to life from just a few details before amplifying into blinding reverbs. A melody played on guitar, a piano sound, and then layers of cotton wool in which silences grow that sound like symphonies. Taylor Deupree's music is minimal and majestic at once. Built from fragments that illuminate entire universes.

"Small Winters" is something of a collaboration between Taylor Deupree and Micah Frank, the owner of Puremagnetik. For the occasion, Deupree played a limited set of instruments in the recording studio: an ARP 2600 synthesizer, a jaw harp, a tape with a few loops, and of course the house jewel, a Small Winters (a three-track recorder with a handful of essential but effective effects). The album's first long track, "Long Winter" (over fifteen minutes), is a limping symphony in which Deupree loops a melody brimming with melancholy. It's followed on the tracklist by seven one-or-two-minute fragments, brief loops that capture you instantly.

Although Taylor Deupree and Uwe Zahn (aka Arovane) both took part firsthand in the digital revolution of twenty-five years ago, "Skal_Ghost" is their first collaboration (12k released Arovane's album "Reihen" in 2021). Among countless possible ways to meet, the two musicians decided that their starting point for recording an album would be the sounds of an old synthesizer they both use, the Nonlinear Labs C15. The ten tracks on Skal_Ghost were born from improvisations, then layered and mixed into skeins of sound that conceal worlds waiting to be discovered.

Journey to the Center of the Earth

At the end of 2023 Taylor Deupree released the first EP of a trilogy that would be completed in 2024, Eav. It marked the first step into the American musician's latest interest: the forest. The five tracks on the listing (which become seven with the two sleep versions of two of the tracks added as bonuses) recount the details of a walk through the woods.
The following EP, Aer, is decidedly darker than its predecessor and gathers just three tracks that amplify the sense of disorientation in the face of nature's sheer majesty and power.
The trilogy's final EP, Ash, is also the rawest and in some ways most unexpected of the three. After so many ecstatic postcards released over the past twenty years, Deupree goes back to scratching the surface with a drone that feels like a climb up an icy wall, "Flashfires". The following "Looming Brittle" is a walk around an alpine lake, with scattered piano notes accompanying the sounds of a solitary, reassuring tranquility.
Field recording sounds blend with acoustic timbres then electronically manipulated by Deupree's golden hands: just a few seconds into "The Anthology Of Fragments" and you already feel like you've known that place forever. The mystery of the forest walk is softened by sounds and smells recognized as familiar. The brief drone that closes the EP, "(We Share The) Dust Garden", is yet another masterpiece arranged with suspensions and silences.

Taylor Deupree is also one of the closest personifications of the concept of the "world novel"; he has Babel-like interests that he pursues all at once, using the most scattered of languages. You could say he cultivates the lost art of conversation, through which, with an outsized number of artists (from Ryuichi Sakamoto to Stephan Mathieu, from Richard Chartier to Eisi, from David Sylvian to Craig Tattersall, to name but a few), he creates pidgins and lingua francas to commit to record.
With Uwe Zahn (aka Arovane) he shares the third stage of the Arbasino-esque triad, both venerable masters who came through the electronic revolution, and an existential curiosity about what they call "music technology". It took them decades to come together around a shared project, and when they finally did, manipulating every possibility of an old synthesizer, the result was Skal_Ghost (12k, 2022), a deep, vertical cross-section of a rich and complex sonic sediment; a more textured Harold Budd who, through overlapping textures, sampling and electroacoustic manipulation, creates heterogeneous environments in constant, magmatic activity. 

Enth (2026) presents itself as the second chapter of that fortunate encounter, but it embraces Deupree's restless, shifting nature and changes up instruments, atmospheres, outcomes and roles. Arovane brings synthesizers, pedals, electronics and a hefty collection of field recordings; Deupree, meanwhile, limits himself to exploring the possibilities of guitar and mixing. The result is a work that's less layered and exuberant than its predecessor, more focused on reflections and ripples on the water's surface than on the secret life of the depths below. The loops are doled out sparingly, favoring a buttoned-up kind of variety.
So while "Terr" makes use of velvety glitches floating within the pulsations of the synths, "Lake" degrades the guitar melody into lo-fi delay beneath a rain of electronics and natural sounds. "Gaun" props up its chords with sandy, melancholic pads that turn darker on "Fas", in a rarefied atmosphere of night and danger.
With its wary nostalgia, "Enth" accompanies elongated guitar notes amid granular jolts of electronics, which on "Fiji" - brightened by a more relaxed, luminous atmosphere - fizz until they merge with the tremulous play of the synths. "Cabin" is the richest track on the record, thanks to the heavy use of field recordings and rough, fragmented textures. "Fult" closes the album with its sweet, melancholic gait; the guitar counterpoints the isolated notes of a piano, all underpinned by a windy, raw, rural loop.
While the pair's enthusiasm is palpable, as is the enjoyment of sharing the experience, this second installment doesn't move us as listeners all that much, relegating us to mere observers of an alchemy that is, yes, well-blended, well-found and well-arranged, but that remains an exercise in style, a poetic back-and-forth between two players who, one way or another, with skill and experience, can always be counted on to bring something home - without ever dropping the ball.

Contributions by Valerio D'Onofrio ("Mur"), Luca Viti ("Enth")

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