Vital Weekly (NL)

12K labelboss Taylor Deupree has worked with Marcus Fischer before, I noticed while browsing old weeklies, and he also released a previous solo release by Fischer, ‘Monocoastal’ (see Vital Weekly 756). The two of them sat together for a couple of days trying out some new music together and at the end of the first day, tired as they were, they sat down and in the background there was just a mono reel-to-reel tape loop from Fischer playing. They looked at each other and decided that the that would be the starting point: two mono tape loops and four acoustic instruments; loops of varying length and picked up with microphones from the build in speakers, adding an excellent sense of warmth to the recordings. The instruments they use are bells, electric piano, stringed instruments and played more or less in an accidental/incidental way; a few notes here and there, and the repeating click of the loops, the point where the repeat starts, as part of the music. This is music that is not unlike the solo release by Fischer or the recent work of Deupree himself (and others on his label). This is very ambient music for sure, exactly as Brian Eno thought of this: a bunch of tape-loops of an unequal length playing together, so that sounds are never in the same place when they collide. It brings that odd shifting of sounds, going back and forth, but here tape-hiss and room quality are added as a bonus instrument. It reminded me of Steve Roden’s music, even when Deupree & Fischer create significantly shorter pieces. It is all of a delicate beauty and deserves to be played a lot. (FdW)