SOLO
ANDATA + SEAWORTHY + TAYLOR DEUPREE "LIVE IN MELBOURNE"
(12K2008)
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BLOW
UP (IT)
Era una bella serata di aprile dello scorso anno. Al Northcote
Social Club di Melbourne salivano sul palco uno dopo l'altro
gli australiani Solo Andata e Seaworthy più Taylor Deupree,
intercettato nel bel mezzo di un tour nel nuovissimo continente.
A un anno di distanza le registrazioni di quel concerto finiscono
su disco e bene catturano il profilo riflessivo dei tre distinti
set. Avvolgente e leggermente scorbutico il sound design del
duo Solo Andata, ciancicare di laptop e piccoli strumenti sparsi;
più narrativo quello di Seaworthy, nell'occasione il
solo Cameron Webb che aggomitola i suoni della sua chitarra
in rarefatta bruma post-rock; mentre Deupree tesse lentamente
e senza fretta la sua musica dal respiro sottile, lungo, regolare,
che - in definitiva e senza sforzo alcuno - si lascia respirare.
BOOMKAT (UK)
Releases like this really hit home how far the 12k label has
travelled since its all-electronic beginnings in 1997. Recorded
live in Melbourne last year, this disc captures three performances
by the current generation of 12k recording artists (including
label boss Taylor Deupree), focusing on music that features
an element of interaction between cutting edge digital technology
and more conventional, acoustic instrumentation. 12k newcomers
Solo Andata are up first, making their debut appearance for
the label a couple of years down the line from their excellent
full-length release for Hefty, Fyris Swan. The duo fuse abstract,
tonal experiments with more melodically coherent jazz influences.
There are grounds for comparison with the more experimentally
leaning works of CCO acts like Dictaphone and Swod, particularly
given the beautiful, ornamental piano phrasings dotted around
the opening of the performance. The music continues to shift
and evolve over the next quarter-hour or so, combining laptop
processes with bowed drones, string plucks and tuned percussion.
It's one heck of a way to make an entrance into the 12k catalogue.
Next up, Seaworthy once again demonstrate that they're a highly
unusual band. Somehow the three-piece manage to reconfigure
the 12k microsound template via the use of slightly mucky electric
guitar, organic drone treatments and subtle looping techniques.
As was the case with their debut album for the label, Map In
Hand, the group combine the idiom of Loren Connors with lowercase
ambience. It's a combination that yields remarkable success,
and leads nicely into Taylor Deupree's concluding set, which
is without doubt the least dynamic of the three performances,
but also arguably the best. Deupree's rich, perfectly proportioned
ambience sounds a little more fragile and rickety than usual,
largely due to the compromised fidelity of the recording. It's
hardly extreme, but in comparison to the immaculate sound quality
we're used to from this artist, we're in lo-fi territory. That
suits the tone of the disc perfectly though, somehow humanising
the crisp, pristine brilliance of Deupree's sound and aligning
it with the earthier sounds of Solo Andata and Seaworthy. No
dawdling on this one, it's strictly limited to a run of just
500 copies for the world.
EARLABS
(.ORG)
Almost a year ago three sound artists sharing parallel musical
aesthetics performed live at a club in the city of Melbourne,
Australia. Solo Andata, Seaworthy, and Taylor Deupree treated
the club's guests that night to trio of warm, laidback acoustic-electronic
soundscapes. As recorded by 12k owner Taylor Deupree. Live in
Melbourne presents to the listener the wonderful sonic happenings
of that evening.
Live in Melbourne shows both aspects of the current 12k aesthetic.
Solo Andata and Seaworthy show how pure digital sounds can be
blended with the organic sounds of real instruments (piano,
guitar) to create an affecting fusion of the two. Taylor Deupree
offers something closer to the original 12k sound by remaining
mainly in the digital domain - letting tiny, delicate shreds
of electronic noise and beautiful digital tones create a fragile,
natural ambiance.
The duo Paul Fiocco and Kane Ikin, although separated by an
ocean, cooperate as Solo Andata . Newcomers to 12k, they have
a full-length release Fyris Swan on Hefty Records . Their set
is the most complex of three both in terms of the instrumentation
used and in the mesh of musical styles. An amalgamation of real
instrumentation samples (piano, guitar, drums, horns) and electronic
textures is used to create a rich, seventeen-minute soundscape
containing beautiful tones, plucked strings, sad melodies, skittering
electronics, and intricate percussion that is brimming with
free-jazz influences.
Seaworthy is the three-member collective consisting of Cameron
Webb, Sam Shinazzi, and Greg Bird. The group's Map in Hand
CD was released by 12k in Novemeber 2006. Their nineteen-minute
improvised set is a spacious, gently meandering, minimal soundscape
of beautiful guitar melodies, field recordings, grainy electronic
textures, and graceful digital tones. The atmosphere of the
their set is vibrant but not in a ostentatious, distracting
way. Restrained shifts in tenor, texture, and melody give the
impression of drifting effortless through time and place.
Making sure that the audience gets a chance to savor the original
signature 12k sound that focuses on gently textured, digital
minimalism, Taylor Deupree concludes the evening by delivering
a very moving thirteen-minute set that he so fittingly and rather
modestly describes himself as a "sparse bed of tones and
digital detritus."; All seemingly completely digital in
composition, his set comes across amazingly pristine and organic.
Live in Melbourne is another excellent release from 12k documenting
a live performance of some the best comtemporary electronic
and post-electronic music out there..
GAZ
ETA (PL)
One presumably warm April night in 2007 in Melbourne's Northcote
Social Club, a performance of new music was featured by two
Australian acts - Solo Andata and Seaworthy - along with one
American - 12K founder, Taylor Deupree. Other than to celebrate
Taylor Deupree's tour of Australia at the time, the shared gig
was missing an outright premise. Though each of these artists
shares a common aesthetic, each one had a slightly different
perspective into musical process that was laid out. Since one
of the members of Solo Andata [Paul Fiocco] moved to Sweden
in 2005, I'm not sure whether their track is a solo piece or
whether it was made as a duo collaboration. Whatever the case
may be, at least Kane Ikin was present. With his laptop in tow,
along with small percussion instruments, the seventeen minute
piece is brimming full of delicate, textural mass and gentle
repeating taps on some wooden object. Very satisfying piece
it is. The trio Seaworthy centers around guitars, piano, electronics
and field recordings. It's the guitar that drives things forward
on their track, while gentle drones provide a nice bed of comfort.
Percussion is quite minimal, while pacing is stretched out to
the maximum. Last act on the bill, Taylor Deupree gives a stunning
performance. Full of far-off crackles, ticks and a drone that
is steady throughout, his music is full of unforeseen turns
and delicate wonder at every corner. "Live in Melbourne"
is one great concert that we're lucky to have captured for eternity.
- Tom Sekowski
MILK
FACTORY (.ORG)
Photographer, sound artist and label manager Taylor Deupree
took to recording the festivities housed under the Social Club
one April night in Melbourne, Australia. With good reason, too,
for the night displayed here bristles with a vast array of events,
too numerous to catalogue. The sonic endeavors of Solo Andata,
Seaworthy, and Deupree himself, are filtered through a refined
sensibility, resulting in a work of coherent flow and balance,
and, perhaps most importantly, an ephemeral elegance bound to
a very real sense of time and place.
Solo Andata, who released the splendid Fyris Swan on
Hefty Records some while ago, gives this album its first breath.
As on that album, the duo display a feel that is gimlet-eyed
and spartan, with woozy but tight harmonies winding through
loops and whispers of distortion added for tonal color. There
is something quite alluring about the discernment and lightness
of touch that the duo possess in the ease with which they see
the elements carefully through a varied series of deconstructions
and reconstructions - moving blithely and effectively from glassine
timbral masses, with piano rotating in eccentric orbits, to
ethereal and minimalist, to finally a tempered sort of jazz,
where isolated guitar lines sound over a shimmer of metallophones,
embedded in a galaxy of bass drones.
From here, Seaworthy provides a variation on a track initially
featured on his 12K release, Map In Hand. His performance
style is intensely fleet. Over the course of the nineteen-minute
composition, slow, moving acoustic guitar figures tighten and
relax across continually shifting tempos, found sounds, and
sonorous humming. In a piece that seems lo-fi in comparison
to the meticulous nature of his full-length albums, Deupree
says the final farewell with a staid, intimate, and attractive
electronic composition that constantly seems to be withdrawing
into itself so as to amass itself upon itself. On a whole, there
is a reasuring, wraparound quality to much of this recording,
like soaking in a forest pool.
TOKAFI
(.COM)
"You never know what's going to happen next, and the moment
you think you know, that's the moment you don't know a goddamn
thing", Auggie Wren, the unlikely und unlucky hero of Wayne
Wang's ";Smoke"; tells his assistant Jimmy while enjoying
a quiet second in front of his tobacco store, ";That's
what we call a paradox."; In a world of unpredictability,
bizarre coincidences and utter absurdness, an album like ;Live
in Melbourne; seems like a zone excempt from the rules of this
statement.
On April 14th, 2007, three closely connected projects met at
the Northcote Social Club in Australia under the auspices of
Room40 label head, sound artists and tireless curator Lawrence
English for an evening of drones, microsounds and processed
acoustic instruments. Melancholic piano chords were struck in
a minor key, weightless licks dripped from the withered body
of a guitar like million-year old drops of water from the ceiling
of a stalagmitic cave, organs faded into oblivion over the course
of an infinitely held tone, bird song duetted with silence and
the blues of a rusty anchorage wrapped itself round a solitary
Jazz Saxophone in a vain attempt of healing the wound a thousand
wrong words had left.
Someone had obviously closed the door at the right moment, locking
out all madness, stress, insanity, questions of politics and
the confusion which goes with a world at war with itself. The
sonic tapestries of Swedish dream weavers Solo Andata: Musical
collage-poems without words. Three-piece Seaworthy';s airy dance
on their guitar's sublimated sonorities: An ocean of light sailed
by a small ship. Taylor Deupree's sustained harmony with faintly
grating-noises: A blanket of warmth, rest and consolation. The
stringing together of their contributions in a continous listening
session: An album of graceful fluency, of delicate gestures
and heavenly dimensions of quietude.
The paradox at the heart of this record lies in the fact that
to arrive at this kind of balance, there must be contrast, friction
and polarity both within each piece and between individual compositions.
This is most obvious in the Solo Andata set, which counterpoints
its finely ringing drones with a wild conglomeration of noises,
ranging from distant drum rolls and nightly forrest hums to
hiss and slow, wooden machine rhythms. The deeper one dives
underneath the surface, the more a subtle chaos starts to reveal
itself, beautifully bound together by the breath of tension
and release.
Just after it has died away with an agitated scene of subtle
metropolitan cacaphony, the pristine simplicity of Seaworthy
takes over, intensifying rather than disrupting the experience.
Even though it is by no means completely out of the question
to somehow subsume all of these artists under the banner of
drones, the value of such assertions is very relative indeed.
Or to put it differently: "Live in Melbourne" works
so well as a cohesive album, because its participants are anything
but a faceless collective.
"Sure, Auggie. I follow", Jimmy replies, "When
you don't know nothing, it's like paradise." This is a
questionable proposition. For if this were indeed true, all
those who failed to order "Live in Melbourne" directly
from 12K until now may be better off than those managed to secure
a copy - limited to just 500 copies, it has already sold out
at 12k. On the other hand, the fact that such a quiet music
can achieve such a screaming success must be regarded as one
of the paradoxes, which make the world a great place to live
in after all. - Tobias Fischer
TOUCHING
EXTREMES (IT)
This limited edition of 500 copies is the recorded testimony
of an evening at the Northcote Social Club in Melbourne where
two sonic entities gravitating around the orbit of 12k - plus
the label boss himself - graced the membranes of the participants
with a stimulating ambient-related piece each, "despite
the ghosts of BBC hijacking the audio system" as Deupree
reports. Solo Andata, the duo of Paul Fiocco and Kane Ikin,
presented a delicately excruciating, diaphanous pastel where
the calmness of the instrumental deployment orientates the character
of the music towards the charms that only conscious melancholy
can generate in a curious pot-pourri of oriental ceremonials
and interfering urban hum that facilitates complete relaxation.
Seaworthy's core member is Cameron Webb, a scientist of the
environment who uses his own field recordings in extremely easy
to the ears compositions based on gentle guitars and loops,
quite reminiscent of Eno in their scarcely surprising, somehow
reassuring progressions and - well, yes - Fripp in the conclusive
junction of suspended, slightly saturated harmonics, although
sweetened by dreamy clean toned arpeggios. Taylor Deupree closes
the show with a hypnotizing segment where everything appears
as recognizable yet actually isn't. What sounds like a repeated
pluck of electric guitar strings stands out in a foggy static
soundscape whose motionlessness is just a creation of the mind,
as instead ripples and rivulets of self-reproducing viscous
materials submerge any tentative opposition to this granular
status quo. To paraphrase early Peter Gabriel, a river of constant,
if scarcely visible change.
VITAL
WEEKLY (NL)
More Taylor Deupree here, but this time not as Ando but as Taylor
Deupree. Last year he was in Australia to play some concerts
and on his way his found his label mates Seaworthy and a new
name Solo Andata (who released on Hefty before). They, being
Paul Fiocco and Kane Ikin open up the CD with a piece in which
they both play their laptop and small instruments, but it's
filled (filed?) with musical gestures. Cello and guitar are
the ones we recognize, which are carefully processed as not
to break the delicate ripples made by the instruments. It moves
seemingly without any problem into the Seaworthy piece, a three
piece of laptop and a real guitar. The guitar here comes to
us unprocessed and tinkles nicely away, embedded, or rather
immersed by a nice set of drones. A sort of condensed form of
their CD, previously on 12K. Slowly things get more abstract
for them but the piece looses its form a bit towards the end.
Deupree, the master comes last and he does what he does best
- the reason why I regard him as one of the masters of the genre.
A relatively simple drone, sparse, organ like, with the sound
of snowflakes falling about.
