soma

abstract ambient 12k etc.

at the close of 2014 i looked back at the year of studio diary entries and was pleased with what came out. i like the idea of daily, creative tasks, when possible. my 2008 polaroid project and 2009 field recording project yielded powerful and useful work that i still reference today. 

as the sun rose on 2015 i wasn't sure if i wanted to do "more of the same" with the studio diary idea but decided i should at least start there, to begin the year creatively. what this project will turn into, i'm not sure. my goal this winter is to start and finish my new solo album so there may be less focus on creating random sounds and more on the actual album work, perhaps posting bits and pieces of those tracks in progress.

regardless, being in the studio is peaceful for me and the worries of the world tend to melt away. i'll do what i can to share my creative process here, sounds.. maybe images, or video somewhere. but for now, it's 2015 and the world speeds by. i hope this diary will help slow it down for you.

Taylor Deupree 2015 Studio Diary

from the 12" Lithops "Sequenced Twinset / Fi" (sonig 08, 1999). Also on the CD compilation "Queries" (sonig 52CD, 2006)

Lithops - Sequenced Twinset

i recorded this sound on april 7th and now, april 16th, i've totally forgotten how i made it.. except that i know it's the modular, and i believe is based around a piston honda MKII oscillator or the intellijel shapeshifter.

maybe.

i'd rather not remember how i made every sound, though. when you know too much about something the mystery is gone.

april 7, 2015 (grey days past)

i've been really busy finishing a 17-speaker sound installation for a public passageway in sapporo, japan these last couple of weeks... but did have time yesterday to fire up the jupiter-8 and make this simple arpeggio which goes through an eventide h3000. i do love the jupiter-8.

april 30, 2015 (a simple jupiter)

Sunrise (ft. Zeitfaktor)

A Moment (Reconsidered)

once again i say where has the time gone... i've had little time to dabble in the studio, been too busy with real work....

but i did manage to do something i've done before a million times... control the verbos harmonic oscillators with a bunch of LFOs, well, in this case, with one expanded turing machine.

the sine waves go into a verbos amplitude and tone generator for the saturation and reverb comes from a lexicon PCM90\

nothing outstanding, but at least i'm tinkering again.

may 11, 2015 (harmonic saturation)

stephen vitiello was in the studio for a couple of days this month and we did some great, sparse work using only a banjo and a hohner pianet. making loops and performances. this is one of the pieces.

may 17, 2015 (sunday with stephen)

on the release date of mine and marcus fischer's "twine" album... which was all created with reel to reel tape loops i thought i'd play around with some tape myself.

this is a cassette loop of, i believe, a hohner pianet, but maybe something else... it's going through a red panda particle pedal with some reverb by a bricasti M7.

october 30, 2015 (a tape for autumn)

starting to prepare some sounds and patching ideas for my upcoming tour in japan this month. my sets will be mostly modular along with some pedals, tapes and probably and OP1.

here i have loaded some sounds from the new album i'm working on into a few Radio Music modules, and am employing a verbos harmonic oscillator for additional sounds. most of this is controlled by a Batumi LFO and there's supporting processing from things like Clouds, an intellijel spring reverb and the 4ms SMR.

the whole thing is going through a bricasti M7 reverb on recording.

november 03, 2015 (japan tour prep)

more experiments and preparations as i hone my live rig and come up with ideas....

modular sample manipulations and live looping with a kaleidoloop.

looking forward to being back in japan....

november 05, 2015 (more preparations for japan)

wow.. it's been a while since i've posted here... the year just got away from me.. not nearly as many postings as last year, but i'm really happy with all of them... been some great exploring and i finally feel like i've come to grips with my modular system.

it never stops growing, though.. and today i received a ZDSP modular with the Grain De Folie and Time Fabric cards...

this is my first attempt, a VERY simple patch with the SIX GRAINS algorithm from Grain De Folie... looping and granulating a simple piano sample from a Nebulae.

very inspirational sound for me.. i can see this is going to really be fun to explore.. and this is a dead simple patch with no modulation or any filtering or any other modules..

just a first experiment.

december 04, 2015 (zdsp 1st experiment)

sounds to me like sitting on a beach, in the winter.

december 15, 2015 (ocean winter)

In the Lens, Solo Andata’s fourth full-length album, was born from recordings found in the interstices of decades-old hard drives, lost email threads from disused accounts, and forgotten samples recorded on cassette dictaphones. These fragments were combined and re-worked with newer elements to create an album very much in the spirit of the band’s debut Fyris Swan (Hefty Records, 2006), an album touched by both folk and jazz and swathed in a dusty, narcotic haze.
Solo Andata’s Kane Ikin and Paul Fiocco have always pushed aside the digital studio in favor of a more haphazard and hands-on workshop vibe to their productions. They prefer near-broken acoustic instruments, cheap microphones and, as can be witnessed by their live performances, tend to turn anything they can get their hands on into a beautiful sound-making object.

While there is a raw and guileless nature to the duo’s sound it is precisely this that makes their music so powerful amidst the over-produced cliches of much modern music. The beauty of their work is how simple instruments and objects can be physically manipulated into creating such rich, layered sound. Dark, swaying, almost-looped melodies from piano, woodwinds and horns wrap themselves in smoky obscurity around remnants of percussion and warm beds of noise and the world around us.

In The Lens is very much a late-night record, reflected in the rain-soaked cover imagery, dripping with half-forgotten memories. Jittery yet calming, rhythmic, yet unhurried, it leads you down its dark corridors to a soft resting space. Ikin and Fiocco have created a new story around the chemistry of their creations that were taking place during the early days of their musical explorations.

In The Lens

Separate Lovers

Leaden Sky

Will Samson - Lua

Somi

Minism

An early recording of "Flying" taken from the album Different Colours

Krimzon

Taken from the compilation album "BineMusic presents Various Artist 2010"

Ancoats 111

Taken from the unreleased album "Weightless" (Ambient Transmissions Vol.2)

Weightless (Ambient Transmission Vol. 2)

Weightless Part 5

Weightless (Part 5)

A Lost Connection

Stationary

Taken from the download only compilation album "13"

Two Kinds Of Silence

With over 100 physical releases since its inception by Taylor Deupree in 1997, New York-based music label 12k has decisively defined and developed the concept of minimalism in the realms of electronic music for more than a decade. Fusing elements from Ambient and Electro-Acoustic Composition with carefully arranged digital textures and associative micro-noises, the label's aesthetics revolve around a precisely-outlined, yet deeply emotional concoction of the technological and the organic. Eschewing the typical marketing mechanisms of the commercial music industry, Deupree has sculpted a platform whose influence today extends well beyond the confinements of the experimental community. 12k's integral approach, in which the label's instantly recognizable, elegantly spartan artwork enters into an inseparable symbiosis with the music, has created a timeless audiovisual language respected and appreciated all over the world.