Taylor Deupree

Atrailblazing sound artist since he started out in the 1990s, Taylor Deupree has quietly carved out a distinct musical path over the years that emphasizes blending natural sounds with technological mediation and is marked by what he calls “a deep attention to stillness”. The works that come out of his studio have a pristine quality, but it is arguably his embrace of “aesthetics of error and the imperfect beauty of nature” that makes them so unique and compelling. Deupree is also a prolific collaborator having worked with many a wide array of artists such as Ryuichi Sakamoto, Christian Fennesz, Stephan Mathieu, Stephen Vitiello, Marcus Fischer, Arovane, and Federico Durand to name but a few. He also founded the vaunted 12k in 1997 which has played no small role in defining an influential concept of minimalism expressed through electronic and electroacoustic music that is still thriving and evolving. On top of all that, Deupree branched into mastering and has helped engineer the sounds of other artists across a variety of genres over the past 10 years.

Many thanks to Taylor for taking time out of his busy schedule to talk to us here at Stationary Travels about his forthcoming new EP Ash as well as his recent crossover collaborations in the modern classical space with Joseph Branciforte and Jeremiah Fraites (Lumineers), and where he may be going next.

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Let’s start with your upcoming new EP ‘Ash’ which will complete a trilogy of Nettwerk label releases spanning the last year and a half. You’ve hinted that this one is a bit darker in tone as compared with ‘Aer’ and ‘Eev’. How do you see that as fitting for the arc you’ve drawn across the three albums?

I feel now that I’m genetically incapable of doing anything really DARK. It is indeed how I set out to do Ash but by the end I’m not sure it’s as dark as I had envisioned and probably contains more hope than I had initially had in mind. The idea was to start each piece using a strong source of noise. This was either from field recordings, synthesized or in one case mic’ing the motor of my Roland Space Echo. I had the title of the album, Ash, already in mind as I started working, so the noise, to me, was the aural representation of ash… detritus, fallout, decay, and I built the pieces up from there. It’s important to me to have a concept going into a project, usually based around a single word or photograph. What happens after the start, however, I just let go. What comes out the other side may not always be what went in the start.

I’ve always been a pessimist, but I’ve taken quite a more firm, pessimistic view of our current social landscape lately (seems it’s hard not to) and that’s where the title and this arc is coming from. Eev began as a hopeful, if cautious, look towards something new. It was my first release for Nettwerk and I wanted to stay comfortable yet actually set my mind on what was going to come later. If Eev was about expectation and dawning, Aer was the breath, the rising up, looking down from above on what had come before, sort of an ascension and awakening. It only seemed natural then, as I was looking to create an arc, that Ash would conclude the sort of sine-wave movement of ups and downs, to be the time of crumbling and falling apart and I guess it was a reflection of my current mindset of the world. There is, however, a hopefulness to Ash and the songs themselves have an internal arc from darker to hopeful. It leaves me at the “what comes next” phase, which is where I’m at now.

It’s important to me to have a concept going into a project, usually based around a single word or photograph. What happens after the start, however, I just let go. What comes out the other side may not always be what went in the start.

I understand that many of the songs we hear go back a few years and had originally been set aside for a release on your own 12k label. How did the idea of this trilogy first emerge and then take shape over time?

I had a nearly completed album that I was going to release on 12k at the time of the Nettwerk signing. While I could have released it on 12k at that point it made more sense to pull apart the best moments and get the momentum going for the Nettwerk stuff. A lot of my songs have very nebulous creation dates to them. I keep an “in progress” folder on my audio drive that has unreleased music going back as far as 2015 on it. I’ll write things and abandon them if I don’t feel they’re working for what I’m trying to accomplish at that moment. Not that they’re “bad” necessarily, but just not working. So, I have this folder of half-finished works that I’ll often return to. Sometimes there will be a nugget in there, a sound, a few loops, that I find interesting and start to repurpose and work on again in a new light. So even a “new” song may have elements from years ago. It’s all a pool to me, malleable sounds and moments I can pull from.

My favorite pieces from the album I was going to release on 12k became the Eev EP. However, I find EPs a strange format. Not as succinct as a single and not as fleshed out as a full length. I think press and the music machine in general has a strange relationship with EPs. Because of this I knew I wanted to turn the EP into a connected series of EPs, to be able to say something more in depth in these smaller chunks… and thus the trilogy was planned. I may, in fact, collect the three EPs onto a single CD, perhaps alternate versions or something, but no immediate plans just yet.

You’ve spoken about how you wanted to do something more “comfortable” on this project and that you hoped it might feel to listeners like a new introduction to your work. How did those objectives translate into your approach to developing the music and how would you compare that to your previous solo projects?

Yes, I think because I had this material ready and it sounded like “me” – it wasn’t going off in any major new directions, that it was a good introduction of my music to both the new audience that Nettwerk could reach as well as my team at Nettwerk themselves. I didn’t want to do anything radically different than I had done before. But I feel now that I’ve explored this area of my creativity enough and look forward to some new directions in the future now that it’s established where I’m coming from.

In terms of my other solo releases, I don’t think anything is necessarily a huge departure from what came before it. More small steps and gradual progression. Really, I can only do what comes naturally. I don’t like to force ideas but at the same time it’s important to try to get myself out of my comfort zones, and this is something always on my mind. I feel like I’m at the point in my career where I don’t have to make excuses for myself, that I can just be who I am.

Let’s talk for a moment about a couple of other recent projects starting with ‘Sti.ll’ which of course was a multi-year collaboration with arranger/producer Joseph Branciforte to reimagine your seminal electronic album Stil. (2002) using only analog sound sources. This was no doubt an immersive and challenging experience for both of you and the musicians involved How does it feel now that it is out there now finding an audience and what’s your perspective of the reaction it has been met with so far?

That was an incredible project. By far the longest, and most expensive, that I’ve been involved with. There’s a lot of press and info out there about it already, so I won’t re-hash it too much, but Joe did an amazing job translating the original music for the ensemble of players. He went to such greater lengths than I expected, figuring out how to mimic some of the strange, electronic glitches and granular sounds with acoustic instruments. Of course, it wouldn’t have been possible without our amazing group of players: Madison Greenstone, Ben Monder, Chris Gross, Sam Minaie, Laura Cocks, and Joe himself.

We had an amazing rollout of press and interviews, and I hope people are enjoying the work. Joe and I are looking at some options and offers to take the album to the live stage, so I hope we’ll see that happen in the future.

With ‘Northern (Redux)’, you had another of your early works reinterpreted in an unconventional way by an artist working in the contemporary classical space, in this case with Jeremiah Fraites. How would you compare & contrast that project with ‘Sti.ll’?

I had actually been considering working on acoustic versions of one of these two albums, Northern or Stil. around the same time, but not certain either of them would actually see the light of day (initial attempt at doing Sti.ll by myself fell apart very quickly). I had recently struck up a friendship with Jeremiah from the Lumineers after I heard him on a radio interview say that my album Northern was one of his favorites, that he listened to it all the time. I think he reached out to me at one point, or we met at a Lumineers show – I forgot exactly – but we struck up a friendship around a shared love for some music gear and ambient music.

After Jer released his solo album, Piano Piano, i approached him with the idea of creating an all-piano version of Northern. I forgot what went down in the meantime, but at one point he started doing some small experiments and we realized that doing a cover of the album just with a piano wasn’t interesting, or at least didn’t interest him. Still determined to rework it in some way, we decided to rebuild the album, from the ground up, with his piano additions at the forefront. I had access to my original sessions of the Northern album, but the files were in a DAW I no longer had (Digital Performer). I was able to at least open the sessions in a demo version of DP and export audio files of the tracks. Some were somewhat broken and poorly organized and all of them used long-obsolete plug-ins and didn’t necessarily sound the same as in the finished tracks. They were, for the most part, just raw audio files of the sounds I used for the original album. Instead of seeing this as a problem, or a hinderance to making the record, we saw it as an opportunity to make it different, to approach the rebuilding from a cleaner palette. The process was highly collaborative, me building new arrangements and Jer responding with piano, or sometimes new arrangements coming from piano he had started. We did a lot of rearranging with live remote sessions; it was quite a fun process. The idea was not to be beholden to recreating Northern perfectly, but to do what served this new version the best. I told Jer that I was not precious about any of the sounds or arrangements from the past and that we were free to tear it apart however we wanted. I think this was a super important part, giving us the freedom to take the project where it wanted to go.

With Sti.ll, I also told Joseph that I wasn’t precious about recreating any of the original tracks note for note, but he actually took the whole transcription process as a challenge to almost do exactly that. His scoring and production were so exact that you can, for the most part, play Stil. and Sti.ll on top of each other and they’ll line up. Unlike with Northern, this “rigidity” is what made Sti.ll so interesting because Joe was challenged by trying to recreate highly digital, granulized sound with acoustic instruments. I think if we approached it from a looser point of view, from simply an essence or an air, it would have been interesting, but not as fascinating. Honestly, it was pretty ridiculous what Joe achieved and how he managed to pull it off.

Your 12k label is still thriving with what appears to be a lot of activity this year. Any recent or upcoming releases you are particularly excited about?

As many artists and labels know, physical sales are as difficult to pull off as ever and I don’t see much of the expected resurgence in CD sales that some people have been hoping for. I’m trying to turn this into an opportunity to work with some new artists because of the lack of overhead involved with digital releases. It allows me to take some chances again, like I did in the early days of the label. We’re going to see some work from new roster members which is exciting.

Shipping prices also continue to get worse year after year. The fact that it costs just about $30 to send a single LP to a customer overseas is, frankly, unsustainable. I don’t blame customers for not wanting to order physical product when the US Postal service is making it unaffordable. All we can do as a label is take it and try to work around it and keep evolving and trying to stay afloat.

It is clear by now that your wear many musical hats so to speak including 12k Mastering in addition to all your solo & collaborative projects and running the label. How have you managed to sustain that over the years, and do you ever find it challenging to keep it all going?

It’s not so hard to do all of this if you love doing it, that’s what it really comes down to. For sure it’s challenging and doing all that on top of having a family and having non-musical interests as well. Among these musical hats I wear, however, it’s really the mastering that takes the priority, simply because it’s very busy and I have clients and deadlines to respect. As a result, my own music gets pushed aside to make room for the mastering schedule, but I do carve out time for my own thing and have found a decent balance.

The label is the simplest of the three because it’s not as constant and only gets busy around release times. More and more, however, there’s an increased pressure to keep up social media presence, which I wish wasn’t a thing, but it has become a necessary evil. I have always let myself be open to adapt and change with the landscape, you have to. You have to pay attention to how the public has spoken in regard to how they want to consume and listen to music. A very large majority of people stream music now and get their information from social media. It would be a disservice to myself and 12k’s artists if I ignored these platforms. As bad as someone may think Spotify is, when 75% of your listeners are using it, it leaves me very little choice. I hope it all goes away one day, but I don’t think it will.

And finally, now that the trilogy and some of these other major projects are complete, where do you see yourself headed next creatively speaking?

I’m starting to generate ideas for a new album, a full-length, a format I have actually not released since 2022’s Harbor. I’m in that stage of looking for a theme, a process, a direction to challenge myself. I’m in the middle of a number of collaborations with other artists as well. It’s always a bit hard to find the time to do all of this, as I talked about before, but I do somehow manage. I have a number of ideas that I’d like to explore so the goal is to make a few experiments and see which one sparks the most interest for me and then run with it… get into the creative flow and see what I can pull from the aether.

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LINKS: Bandcamp catalog | Website | 12k label | 12k Mastering