Vital Weekly (NL)

Whoeehee. Now here’s a nice boxed set, that is the limited edition only. The CD, well, is just the CD, but try and get the double CD boxed set, which has besides these two CDs, twelve photographs on sturdy stock made by Taylor Deupree with a plastic hand-built 35mm camera, which look like Rohtko paintings erased with acid. Very nice, and very fitting the music of Deupree. It has that highly abstract feel, but if you look closer you may see faint (indeed) traces of forms, in the music moving as small melodies. Such as in ‘Sundown’, which has something like humming voices, which reminds me of Eno’s first ‘Ambient’ record. Shimmering melodies are also present in the four other, lengthy pieces, but here with guitars it seems (although only one track is credited as such, with guitar playing by Cameron Webb) and perhaps such things as field recordings. Now obviously there is an extensive amount of computer processing in play here, but it all has that overall warm glow to it. Of faint (again) sounds, from a distance, humming across far away fields, in empty rooms with radiators, or a man tinkling his guitar in ‘Stutter’ (the one played by Webb actually). This reminds me all very much of Brian Eno indeed (also ‘Apollo’ comes close in this piece), and Deupree is not a copy-cat but an equal peer to Eno, creating some of the finest and richest ambient music I know, but perhaps just a bit shorter than mister Eno does. On the bonus disc, we have something long form Eno way, ‘Thaw [Reprise]’, which lasts almost thirty-nine minutes and spans out any of the events of the shorter version, found on the main disc, into a mild flowing, expanded piece of music, in which there is no hierarchy in sounds, but everybody gets an equal share in the proceedings. It’s a first rate Deupree release, but perhaps I didn’t expect anything less. (FdW)