TAYLOR
DEUPREE "OCCUR" (12K1013)
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ALTERNATIVE
PRESS (US)
TINY
SOUNDS BECOME AN ALL-ENCOMPASSING SOUNDWORLD.
taylor deupree's ultra-minimal electronic music is similar to
the work of tetsu inoue (with whom deupree collaborated on 2000's
shimmering, delicate active/freeze) and other microscopic
sound artists. some of occur's louder passages, though,
wouldn't seem out of place on main's hz series of EPs
from 1995. deupree creates a soundspace in which the listener
is forever concentrating not only on hearing the tiny crunches
and high-pitched pings that make up occur's nine untitled
cuts, but also on determining what's been drownded out by the
ambient noise. this music tests listener perception even as
it invites relaxation. - phil freeman
AMBIENTRANCE (US)
A
true artist will follow their own muse wherever it leads them...
not to the hot trend of the week; appropriately then, Taylor
Deupree is once again called into the quieter side of the microglitchtronic
galaxy... and not everyone will share his vision. Those who
do will find the minimal occurences of Occur to be crystalline
understatements of an exploratory nature.
Minute
ringing sheens and scritchy blurts lurk through an ephemeral
haze of 1s and 0s as the silicon jungle of 1 occasionally rumbles
with subaudible bass pulsations. Similarly alive with nano-organics
2 could be a field recording from a computer-generated marsh.
A
too-miniscule-to-be-distinct cycle of insectile chitter thrums
behind the spaciously applied clicks and whirrs of 4.Bathed
in streams of static, 5 emits a repetitiously warbling tone
and higher swirling strands. Energetically spewing molecules
add a sense of elation to the more-dynamic spatters of 6.
Shorty
7 (1:38) features the brief interplay of soft tones and little
poppy specks against barely perceptible gaseousness. There's
a faraway-foghorn-like quality to the resonant tones of 9 (9:09)
which seem to beckon, steering your ears through the sparkling
channels of faintly percolating glitchcraft.
45
minutes of obtuse micronoise Occur under the loving guidance
of 12k leader, Taylor Deupree... his renderings from the "snap,
crackle and pop" pallette avoid any semblance to the straight-forward
musical world, instead following unseen pathways into previously
unheard regions. An 8.4 for these fragile audio enigmas.
12k
is perhaps the leading source of such things, and more.
EARPIECE
(US)
amazingly
constructed piece of work. deep throbs of bass tones, slithering
white-noise background sounds, digital pops, metallic rings...
all present in a well composed deliberate litter. the sounds
do _occur_... with an organic feeling that they belong right
as presented. a highlight of minimalist, digital electronic
composition that realizes the promise of the expansion of tools
available thru synthesis of preceding genre. just go find it
and listen. a thorough & complete triumph.
ELECTRONIC
MUSIC REVIEWS.COM (US)
called
"minimal," "glitch," "click and cut," or just plain "ambient."
However, few of these artists have been creating this style
of music longer than Taylor Deupree, few of those countless
labels have been releasing this music for as long as Deupree's
own 12k label, and (most importantly) few artists are as consistent
and as consistently interesting as Deupree has been over the
last ten years. Deupree's first forays into this "glitch" sound
occurred back in the early-to-mid-1990s under monikers like
Human Mesh Dance and S.E.T.I. That early music was primarily
"techno" (that is, rhythm) based, but there was a hint of a
more stripped-down, minimalist sound lurking underneath all
the beats. This experimental sound came out in full force after
Deupree started the 12k label in 1997 as a reaction against
another record company's unwillingness to release Human Mesh
Dance's Thesecretnumbertwelve. Although this new work was, principally,
centered on rhythms, there was an undercurrent of microscopic
sounds that flittered around and above that rhythm, giving the
songs a far more interesting (and more unusual) color than more
traditional techno tracks. This work signaled a shift in Deupree's
own music toward the study of microscopic sounds.
Deupree's
solo work on the 12k label and on his .N disk (released by Ritornell)
focus these microscopic sounds not around specific rhythms or
melodic patterns but around concepts culled from science, architecture,
and everyday life. The aforementioned .N focuses on the concept
of nanotechnology, which is the science of microscopic functional
structures (aka atom-sized machines capable of altering objects
at their molecular level). The music on this disk is sparse,
evasive, even silent, yet when sounds emerge, they emerge in
disparate and unsettling patterns, rarely repeating yet continually
oscillating--just like little nano machines. It's a fascinating
work, but it's a work that took me a while to fully appreciate
and enjoy because it is so fundamentally minimal that it is
almost devoid of things most music has in abundance, like rhythm,
song structure, melodies, and so on. Once I understood and appreciated
the work for what it was, however, I couldn't stop listening.
Deupree's
most recent solo release is Occur, which the 12k website describes
as "a work of non-repetition and subdued melodic passages composed
almost entirely by granular synthesis algorithms." Say what?
Well, break it down (using my handy dictionary):
-
Granular: "Consisting of or resembling grains." (Duh)
-
Synthesis: "The combination of ideas into a complex whole."
-
Algorithms: "A precise rule specifying how to solve some problem."
After
putting these terms together and focusing them around music,
"granular synthesis algorithms" would suggest a system whereby
small, evasive sounds are combined together to form complex
wholes. That's a rather general concept, of course, but there's
more to it than that. The 12k website again: "Initially inspired
by the often quiet urban sounds outside of his studio in brooklyn,
new york, the concept behind occur grew to become pieces about
all things brief - glimpses, things that come and then are gone.
these are singular occurrences in time, like the passing of
a car or the blinking off of a street light at night. the brittle
and sporadic granular tones crunch and crumble about the stereo
field creating an implied urban soundscape." So, basically,
the tracks on Occur project (in sound) glimpses of time--always
different, always fleeting. The granular part comes in as a
way to structure these seemingly unstructured glimpses into
a composite whole (synthesis).
Interesting
stuff--theoretically. But what's the end result? Well, Deupree's
a great artist, and even when they are not fully successful,
great artists are usually interesting. This disk is certainly
interesting, and it is generally successful. There are points
where tracks get a bit tiring, and there are even points where
the sounds themselves become overtly repetitive (thereby calling
into question the whole "glimpse" idea, in my mind). But, in
all, this is a generally fascinating application of a theoretical
concept.
Above
everything else, Deupree's music comes alive when the sounds
are moving, shifting, changing pace and tone, either quickly
or slowly. The best moments here seem alive, in the same way
that a blood vessel is alive or the a knife scraping a plate
is alive. The first track, for instance, includes sounds...but
how do I describe them? How do I describe a flittering (not
oscillating) humming noise that floats around at times, goes
away at other times, and returns? Such a sound does not seem
to serve any purpose, and yet its purpose is its very existence
within the track. This is true of most sounds I hear on this
disk. Each sound is deliberate, and yet deliberately accidental.
Sounds start and stop on no one's cue (or so it seems). This
is arrhythmic music at its absolute, well, "arrhythmicalest."
Most of these sounds are alive because they do not seem to be
controlled by anyone, not even Deupree. And yet these sounds,
together, generally form cohesive, complete wholes. How is this
possible?
Andrei
Tarkovsky, the great Russian filmmaker, describes film as the
act of recording time. To him, a great filmmaker knows where
to place a camera, when to start it, and when to stop it. What
that camera records is the passage of time, and it is the recording
of time itself--time that is carefully ordered and controlled
by the camera--that distinguishes good cinema from bad cinema.
I think Deupree follows the same logic when creating music.
He takes the random noises of computers and everyday life, but,
rather than controlling these sounds, he controls the instruments
(computers, mostly) that produce these sounds. Where the sounds
go, what the sounds do is less important that how they are recorded.
Because he knows which sounds to focus on, when to start recording,
and when to stop, the tracks on this disk are generally elegant
and interesting, and not simply random noise. Where the disk
faulters is when those sounds seem too controlled, too organized,
as in the final track, which seems like an exercise in repetitive
sound that is slowly (too slowly?) transforming from one thing
to another. This track is less successful because the control
here is less on the instrument level than on the sound level.
We hear the sound repeating itself; we don't actually experience
the sound moving on its own accord. Track nine, in other words,
sounds too mundane, too much like other "glitch" tracks by other,
lesser artists.
Obviously,
Deupree's music isn't for everyone. There are plenty of people
out there who would be bored to tears after about 10 seconds
of this disk. I'm not one of those people--frankly, if I were
one of those people, I wouldn't have bought the record in the
first place. But those of you out there who own copies of Clicks
& Cuts, who are aware of and excited by the "glitch" sounds
emerging from all parts of the world, but who might be bored
by the rather tired cliches that have crept into this genre,
would be wise to check out this disk, for it represents a new
direction in "glitch" music, a direction away from order and
manipulation of sound and toward an open-ended study of the
mechanisms that shape and define sound (including, of course,
the human brain). I actually prefer Deupree's .N a bit more
than this disk, in part because Occur does not fully live up
to the interesting concept that Deupree sets forward on the
website. In all, however, Occur is a good work, a work of real
creativity and rewarding ideas, but perhaps it is an even better
manifesto.
Michael
Heumann
FAQT
(US)
Like
a shadow on the sidewalk at night, the dull hum of appliances,
or an impossible wind faintly brushing against the hairs on
your arm, "Occur" plies itself on you like a subliminal sensation.
Composed via granular synthesis ("Granular synthesis of sound
is the generation of thousands of short sonic grains which are
combined linearly to form large scale audio events. The characteristics
of the grains are definable, and these combine to give the characteristics
of the overall sound. However the parameters used in defining
the grains do not map directly to the parameters of the large
scale event. It is the interaction of the various grain parameters
which define the micro structure of an event. The macro structure
of an event is generated by the change in the characteristics
of the grains.") by Deupree, the nine tracks on "Occur" all
find points in your memory cache to tickle with prickly pops
and muddy bass wobbles. Track four disassembles the memory of
the pass-and-run sounds of a daisy wheel printer with years
of tape-hiss occlusion, while track six laps shimmering ambient
waves against your ears that carry in the occassional staticky
detrieus of a decayed beat. Upping the melodic bits and softening
the structures of the kind used on last year's collaberation
with Tetsuo Inoue, Taylor Deupree offers "Occur" as additional
proof that he is the Brian Eno (or maybe the Mark Rothko) of
the IDM generation. - jason olariu
INCURSION
(CA)
It
has been three years since Taylor Deupree released a solo record
on his own 12k label (since 1998's comma). This new title, occur,
is the first of a two-part series, and will be followed up within
a year's time by "its polar opposite" titled stil.. Inspired
by the production techniques developed during his collaboration
with Tetsu Inoue on last year's excellent active/freeze CD,
Deupree has created 9 tracks of non-repetitive and abstract
sound structures inspired by all things brief. What strikes
me most about this work is its incredible dynamic range; from
side to side to side, up and across, narrow and wide, these
sounds occupy a generous virtual space. The liner notes suggest
professional monitoring or headphone listening. With headphones
the listener is made more aware of the finer touches in the
music and the diversity of the sound palette - the subtle shifts
and slight variances, the closeness of the sounds - and yet
what is lacking with headphone use is the force of the bass
tones. It's an incredible experience to feel this bass resonate
deep inside your chest, and with an adequate system (and a capable
subwoofer) you can achieve the best of both worlds: the intimacy
of the sounds (the details around the stereo field) as well
as the physical presence of the bass tones. In keeping with
his subject matter, Deupree keeps things transitory on occur.
Only on track 5, and very briefly in a few other places, do
we witness a tendency towards repetition, but even this remains
dynamic and granular. The sounds crunch and form clusters in
the foreground, apparent patterns change in moments, sounds
appear and disappear at a glance, and yet still Deupree manages
to keep the silence around the sounds in tact. Perhaps his finest
work to date, occur comes highly recommended. [Richard di
Santo]
OTHER
MUSIC (US)
When
Simon and Garfunkel sang of the "sounds of silence," what they
meant was that even in the constant noise and chaos of the U.S.
of 1968 stood moments of tranquility. 30-year-old radical electronic
minimalist Taylor Deupree also understands how silence can hold
a sense of the serene, but how, when it is interrupted, even
with the wings of a hummingbird, the effect can be startling.
For the uninitiated, "Occur," may sound like nothing more than
long periods of sonic absence followed by sporadic sounds made
under a microscope. Track No. 4 (the pieces are not titled)
isn't going to be on the next "Clicks & Cuts" compilation,
though it does have elective affinities with the approach of
some of the artists on those compilations. Like his peers Ryoji
Ikeda, Kim Cascone, Richard Chartier, and Carsten Nicolai, Deupree
is very much a sound scientist, measuring by the width of a
hair each sound, its resonances and consequences. [TH]
VITAL
WEEKLY (NL)
Aside
from running the 12k label, Mr. Deupree is also quite busy making
music. Sometimes in the more dance floor oriented direction,
at other times in a more 'serious' manner, like this. It's been
said often lately that microwave or glitch or click 'n cuts
have seen the best, but after hearing this CD, one can honestly
say that isn't true. In nine tracks, Deupree brings together
the best that one can hope for within the genre. Subtle, gentle
and harsh when needed, these pieces convey a sense of sound,
timing and space, that goes beyond the boundaries of genres,
but staying very much within the glitch vocabulary. Again words
simply fail.....Just get it. [MR]
THE
WIRE (UK)
time to lose yourself in the breaks, transience and discontinuities
of acoustin experience once again. taylor deupree probes the
quiet urban sounds that come and go outside his brooklyn studio
to create a network of singularities. the extended scintilation
and hiss on track 4 has an unsettling allure. listen carefully
and you can hear the sound of an aesthetic programme dissimulating
itself.
XLR8R
(US)
brooklyn-based taylor deupree continues on occur to make
a respectable name for himself in the microsound community.
the premise for this releqase is that the uiet, unstructured
pops, clicks, bass moans and minimal atmospheric sounds capture
the essence of true ambient noise - that is, the random, unsequenced
machine and urban sounds that most people filter our from their
interactions with the world. the sound, meditated as it is,
of cars wisping by outside, of leaves dancing by the hundreds
across the lawn in the fall. delicate and seemingly fractured,
occur will be followed within the year by a highly repetitive
analog, stil. - heath k. highnight
