Vital Weekly (NL)

Following the footsteps of Fennesz, Taylor Deupree now releases his album with Ryuichi Sakamoto. But these seeds for this collaboration where already planted in 2006, when Deupree did a remix for Sakamoto, and the latter released on 12K before, when he worked with Christopher Willits. In these recent years, Sakamoto excels at playing the piano and no longer seems to be working with synthesizers, like in his earlier life with Yellow Magic Orchestra. The basic recordings for this album was Sakamoto’s piano playing, recorded in rehearsal for a concert he did with Deupree in April 2012.  His playing is sometimes traditional, with a few notes and keys being played, but he also plays the piano in a more ‘prepared’ fashion, inside, the board and strings. All of this makes an excellent starting point for Deupree to continue. Taking the sounds from this playing but also from the room the piano was in, the chair Sakamoto sits on and all of that, transforming them them, and adding more sounds toit, while maintaining an overall feeling of silence and emptiness makes up forty-five minutes of highly careful, meditative music; but not always just careful, or just silent. That would be some kind of boring new age music and that is not the case here. Deupree knows how to add sounds which are a bit sharper, with a bite, an edge. If you play this at a low volume you may not notice this very well, but turn up the volume and you see what I mean. You will discover so much more here, which is sometimes buried beneath, way beneath, the level of audibility. Then this wealth of sounds unfolds, with high pitched tones, the squeaking of a chair, and obscure rumblings of contact microphones, which makes this record a cross between an electro-acoustic record and an atmospheric excursion into the land of piano. Brian Eno would not have this any better!