Taylor Deupree - Snow (Dusk, Dawn) (12k)

Last years Weather and Worn was a key record in shaping my musical year, irresitable droney experimentalism in bite size pieces, impossible not to listen to again and again. And although he boasts a large back catalogue and impeccable taste as head of 12k and Line i've yet to find anything by him that's quite matched up to Weather and Worn's magical warmth, until ironically now with the coldly entitled "Snow (Dusk, Dawn)".

Another masterpiece much in the same manner as the aforementioned, inspired by the late winter snow of 2009 and part of a multimedia project that you can read about below.

The way he combines surface noise with dreamy rotating drones is near perfect as the track rotates and swells gently never straying too far from the early sounds but developing enough to keep the interest whlist still not forcing its way to the forefront, perfect music to relax or read to. The kind of outcome you'd expect should Jana Winderen have bumped into either Collin Olan or Rutger Zuydervelt during their respective experiments with ice but ten times better.

What The Label Said :

please note: Snow (Dusk, Dawn) will only be available during the opening night of Taylor Deupree's Unseen photography show in Tokyo on April 15th. Any copies remaining from this night will then be available in 12k's online shop on a first-come-first-serve basis. About a month following the opening of Unseen the musical portion of this edition will be made available through our digital distribution network.

Transience, ephemerality. There is beauty in things that don’t last. Taylor Deupree’s Snow (Dusk, Dawn), a multimedia project incorporating sound and photography, is based around 63 photographs taken with expired polaroid film. This particular film produces images cast with other-worldly blueish hues and almost immediately begin to fade; losing color, to deep browns, and then finally, within 24 hours after being shot, to complete black.

Deupree’s work is often inspired by nature, particularly the winterscapes near his home and studio in rural New York. With the polaroid film in hand, which he knew would capture only a fleeting image, he shot images during the first heavy snowfall of the winter of 2009, at dusk, in the setting sun; nothing was to last, the snow, the image, the day. The next morning, barely at sunrise, he set out again to finish the film, in a dawn that wasn’t going to last.

As quickly as he could, following each photo session, Deupree scanned the polaroid prints, capturing the first white snow in ghostly blue before the pictures faded to black. Each of these scanned images is printed and displayed next to its original, black polaroid counterpart in the package along with the cd. Each copy of this edition of 63 is thus rendered unique, each with a different print and polaroid.

For the music portion of the project there is also contrast, transience, and decay. A fragile melodic loop, distressed by surface noise, struggles to keep its repetitive flow over a quiet and languid 18 minutes as it subtly, but constantly, loses ground and eventually becomes fragmented and falls away amongst the elements that surrounded it.

Snow (Dusk, Dawn) captures the essence of what much of Deupree’s work is about: imperfection, time, and memory. He uses both high- and low-tech means of creating rich works that scrape away at the surface of digital sterility. Avoiding the con- trolled manipulation offered by computers he prefers natural and unpredictable processes to add depth and texture to this work. Outdated film, cheap cameras, dust and leaking light effect his photographs while guitars, found percussion, old analog synthesizers and recordings of falling snow provide the soundtrack to a moment in time that comes and goes like dawn.

This edition is being presented at the NADiff Gallery in Tokyo, Japan on April 15th as part of Deupree's Polaroid photography show, Unseen.

The edition contains: 3" CD - Original Polaroid print - Color print of pre-faded Polaroid image - Letterpress card.

A PDF file of the entire edition can be viewed HERE.

Simon James French - Anthem (Hibernate)

Another hugely impressive release from the Hibernate label and perhaps my favourite on the label so far. Five tracks of drones that border on ethereal, each one lovely and slow. Listen hard enough on opener Serfdom and you can hear the faint sound of children playing against the windy drones and Ian Hawgood like crumples.


It's one of those releases that doesn't overdo it time wise, like Tom White's and Taylor Deupree's releases of last year, you don't feel that you have to take an afternoon off to listen to it, instead, instant, to the point and seemingly tireless.

Simon James French - Anthem - Stream Here

Hibernate Label



What The Domestic Soundscape Said :

I met Simon James French at Middlesex University when I was working on the Cut and Splice Domestic Soundscape podcast series. Along with several other artists he came to the informal workshops/classes I gave there about Sonic Wallpaper and contributed to the discussions on that topic which ended up in podcast #2 of the series, Rooms and Chambers.

I have kept in touch with SJF through following his blog Plundr Tumblr which I really enjoy reading, and was recently interested to read of his EP release, Anthem, which can be heard and downloaded here.

Serfdom - the first track - opens with generously rich and sonorous drones, the rustle of jeans and a distant patina of joyous voices. These drones continue over the subtly-changing soundscape beneath and there is a delicate, fragmentary quality to the snatches of environmental sound-recordings which move in your peripheral hearing as you listen. Is that a dog’s collar jingling? A tractor or other trundling, slow-engined vehicle?

Plunder is distinctly more ominous with more obscure and difficult-to-identify sounds lurking inside one another, ringed by dull, bell-like sounds. The tone darkens in the opening sections of Misery. Somewhere around here environmental sounds begin to rise out of the drone-soup and up to the fore, and there are some lovely sonic elements which remind me of my electronic cooker with its tap-tap-tapping sound, the bubbling hiss of onions frying or perhaps even the sound of rain pattering intensely on a surface. I love how the material qualities of sound are used here; how it somehow suggests wetness or dryness, scratchy or smooth, soft or hard, and how this materiality fleshes out the relative purity of the drones. The ethereal dronescape re-emerges towards the end of Misery and, surrounded by rustling sounds, there is an almost choral atmosphere to this section - like someone singing inside electronic wires - before the ponderous and slowly moving sequences of Falsehood open. Metallic, resonant and restless, this track pans about like an animal trying to get comfortable in its hole and fades to emptiness so that the last track - Shame - can round up the whole EP, which it does, in a rapturous crescendo of tremelo-rich drones, backdropped by what I think is the sound of cars passing.

At times in its gentleness I find this release to be very remeniscent of Greg Davis’s release, Somnia, but where Davis uses very pure drones and melodies which make it feel as though Somnia has been composed in a vacuum-sealed box, SJF allows his music to rub shoulders with a bit more environmental texture and I like this difference between the two. I enjoy the use of sounds throughout, and the pacing of each track, and the sense of Anthem as a complete work with discrete sections. My only criticism of this release is that the epic quality to the track titles and the release title itself - Anthem - do not necessarily, at least to my ears, reflect the delicacy and subtlety of the sounds contained throughout. There is something intimate and mellow about Anthem with its evocations of interior or familiar environs that I find more like vespers and less like an anthem, but I think this is a small point, and the overall sense of choral religiosity in the music makes those giant track titles forgiveable.

Tom White - Sight See / A Well-Known Phrase

Tom White - Sight See (Smallfish)
- A Well-Known Phrase (Under the Spire)

It'll be at the end of the year when people are moaning that it’s been another awful year for music when i pipe up as always with a hundred and one recommendations, pretty close to the top of my list though will be Tom White.

The Ambient/Drone/Experimental genre seems to have an endless supply of new artists with endless supplies of material, many of the forerunners of the genre having numerous releases each year, Lawrence English, Taylor Deupree, Machinefabriek. On first impression it’s an incredibly limited field, most songs are barely there, notes decomposed and shredded, recycled and made new, drifting along seemlessly and yet it's the genre that has really grabbed me by the ears this year. It has an ability to pull you in, the wrap itself around your very lobes, the quietly seduce you into soft and dreamy sleep. There are many experts in this field, a number of whom I’ve already mentioned and a handful more that will be strong contenders for album of the year, Molly Berg + Stephen Vitiello if you need names. Right now though, Tom White rules my world. 8 months through the year and two delightful releases so far on a pair of the most reliable labels out there.

First up the wonderfully short Sight See release from Smallfish. All too often i find myself put off by massively long ambient tracks, albeit psychological and maybe due to more than a little Last.fm OCD. How refreshing it is to see tracks of less than five minutes and on a couple of tracks less than two, beautiful pieces mixing both drone and elements of noise while never outstaying their welcome.


I was more than surprised to see the level of quality surpassed on the follow up on up and coming underground label Under the Spire. A Well-Known Phrase is nothing less than a treat, more gritty and more experimental and featuring a healthy nod towards perhaps one of my favourite artists of the genre Ben Frost, balancing the excursions into noise with delicately growing soundscapes.

An album is expected before the end of the year, one can only look forward with eager anticipation.

Taylor Deupree, Stephen Mathieu, Jana Winderen

Taylor Deupree - Weather/ Worn
Stephen Mathieu - The Key to the Kingdom
Jana Winderen - Surface Runoff

I'll admit that drone is not the easiest genre to get into, it takes years of straightforward post rock followed by a departure to more string and piano based instrumental music before it finally clicks, a gentle departure from music being about playing instruments and rather using the everyday sounds and electrical surges to form a hum of pleasing decay.

Its often the case with drone that songs extend past the six, seven minute mark, maybe past fifteen and nearer half an hour, and although I love some of the longer tracks I’m sure that I’m not alone in having been put off by such lengths of time.

The open minded listener who wants to understand why drone is so raved about will no doubt be grateful for these three short releases. Short in length but certainly not in quality.


The impecably named Taylor Deupree, who runs the erm impecable 12k label delivers his first vinyl offering on the label, and the cute story that goes along with it will surely only make you love this release all the more.

These two pieces came about from pottering around on a rainy day with some loop pedals and a collection of instruments including acoustic guitar, kalimba, and bells. Deupree explains: "Pixel, one of my cats, was sleeping next to me as I began to create a warm bed of drones and small noises in an attempt to warm the room and my spirits." As it so happens, the cat in question does actually contribute to these pieces, lending a wheezy snore to the music, immediately bringing to mind the reposeful feel of a Bagpuss episode coming to a close.

Watery and expansive, these are a delight to listen too, interestingly enough the digital release includes an extended version of Worn, cloking in at over 23 minutes and somewhat surprisingly making itself the best track of the bunch given the extra space to breather and expand.


Stephen Mathieu presents the wonderfully entitled The Key To The Kingdom, a two part 10" release, as etheral sounding as it is glaciel, dreamy drones melting away effortlessly and magically.

And finally a most interesting release from Jana Winderen, for those who fell in love with Annea Lockwoods idea of mapping the Danube for her album A Sound Map of the Danube, but just couldn't hack its sparseness, then Jana Winderens Surface Runoff may well satisfy your curiosity, 'Drift' is a collage based on underwater documents from several rivers across different continents, and its as wonderful as it sounds.