Taylor Deupree (Interview)
Good morning.
Today we’re listening to Taylor Deupree, an American ambient musician based in upstate New York. We first recommended his music back in 2019. Deupree began making electronic music in the ‘90s, and was guided by early memories of fascinating sounds toward ambient music, as he tells us below. He released his first LPs in 1998, the second of which was Stil., whose techno-inflected ambient pieces looped conspicuously and embraced the artifacts of digital recording techniques. Around 25 years later, working with Joseph Branciforte, Deupree remade the record using only acoustic instruments, the result being Sti.ll which came out in May. A conversation with Taylor follows the streaming links.
Sti.ll - Taylor Deupree (60m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal
Stil. - Taylor Deupree (60m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal
Tell us about your earliest memories of music.
I have two very early memories of sound itself. One is the sound of my mother vacuuming downstairs while I was lying in my bed. I distinctly remember loving this sound of muted white noise coming through the floor from below. The other very visceral sound memory for me was the scratchy, lo-fi sound of a baseball game playing on AM radio in the car. My father would listen to baseball games on car trips, often late at night while I would try to sleep in the back seat. This distant, thin sound of the radio would lull me to sleep and brings back these vivid memories of quiet nights on the road in the summer. I directly attribute my love for scratchy, distant sounds to this memory.
Musically, I suppose my first “favorite band” was The Beatles, when I was very young. Although my parents would often play classical or bluegrass music in the house. There was always some music playing. I come from a very music-appreciating family.
I also have a very vivid memory of being a child, riding my bicycle down the sidewalk, and somehow associating this with the song “Dust In The Wind” by Kansas. A very beautiful song!
Sti.ll (great title) is a reproduction of your 1998 album, Stil. When did it first occur to you to remake that record? What did you want to achieve this second time around?
Maybe three or four years ago I had the idea to see if I could recreate this work using acoustic instruments I had on hand: a Pianet, xylophone, melodica. I think it was just my desire to approach something purely digital I did in the past with my more recent interest in acoustic instrumentation. I thought Stil. would be “easy” because it is so repetitive, but I quickly realized that to properly capture the intricacies and subtle shifts I would need to bring someone else on board. I reached out to my friend Joseph Branciforte who I know had experience in this exact thing from his work with Kenneth Kirschner. I had a good feeling that Joe could not only interpret and transcribe this music for an acoustic ensemble but would also know the players that we would need to hire. Once we got into it I was astounded at the level of detail he took to it. It was incredibly microscopic, amazingly accurate to the original work. Joe was able to transcribe it for a much wider range of instruments than I knew how to play myself and it took some very skilled players with advanced technique to pull off the sounds we were trying to achieve.
The idea ended up being us wanting to create a fairly accurate, note-for-note acoustic version of Stil. The main rule was to only use sources recorded with a microphone, no fancy digital effects (just a touch of reverb here and there, and very sparing use of EQ). One of the great challenges was how to capture the electronic and granular nature of the original sounds with acoustic instruments. The detail, texture, and quality was all in Joe’s engineering; microphone choices and placements and the incredible technique of the players, not to mention their willingness to do something a bit different.
We listened to your excellent conversation with and Joseph Branciforte on the podcast. The fidelity with which you and Joseph arranged the live instrumentation blew our mind. How did that process work and what were some of the challenges you ran into?
Joe is a very talented engineer with an incredible selection of microphones and preamps in his studio, so we were using top-notch equipment and had a beautiful signal flow. One of our desires was to capture the signal how we wanted it, get it as close to perfect as we recorded, instead of fixing things later with a lot of EQ or effects. This is where Joe shines because he has these skills to practically mix the album as it’s being tracked. He’s controlling the tone by the choice of microphones and their placement. As a result you hear a very pure, very high quality recording that we had to barely touch afterwards… it’s a very pure sound. We used a little bit of reverb (a Bricasti M7 and Meris/Chase Bliss 1978) on some of the tracks for space, but otherwise there is no trickery, no weird effect plug-ins or anything. Just pure acoustic sound captured as faithfully as we could.
I don’t think there were a lot of challenges, or real difficulties, per se. In fact, this approach probably made things easier in the end for us. Making sure the captured signal was as good as it could be saved us from laboring over a huge mix in the end. Joe does a lot of ensemble recording and engineering so he is very quick and professional about the setup and flow.
Tell us about working with the late great Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Ryuichi and I only got to work in the studio for one project, which was the Disappearance album. While we would have loved to do more, and talked about it from time to time, his schedule was just too busy. Because of this we made sure to record live performances when we could and were able to release two live albums, one with Illuha from Yamaguchi, Japan and one from a concert in London [Editor’s note: see it on YouTube].
Because he was based in New York we were able to see each other, eat together and such, and always had a good time. He was very easy to work with, always seemed interested in exploring new sounds and approached the projects with a very open mind. I think he had accomplished enough in his lifetime that he had nothing left to prove! So he was really able to just follow his interests with a full heart.
We've noticed an uptick in interest in ambient music of late. You've been making such music for decades. Have you registered the same change, and if so why do you think more people listen to ambient music these days?
I am not so sure I notice it… Perhaps in the realm of Spotify playlists – “Study music” and “Sleep music” and such – although I’m not sure these creators are after the deepest of ambient music, or the most subtle. The Grammy Awards have amended their “New Age” category to include the word “ambient,” so maybe that is an indicator of what you are noticing. I’m also not quite sure what the general public thinks “ambient” is or should be. It’s a genre tag that hasn’t splintered into a dozen sub-genres, for some reason. With techno or dance music, for example, a new genre is born every time someone uses a new bass sound. Ambient has been “ambient” for a long time and probably means quite different things to different people. I’ll watch a YouTube video of some guy demoing a synth playing “ambient” music and I don’t find it ambient at all.
I have often said that I made ambient music to help escape from a word that grows more complex, divisive and violent… so perhaps others are seeking that refuge in music as well. The world certainly needs more quiet. People need to stop talking. I mean, really stop talking, and listen more.
What music, if any, do you listen to while doing busywork, like answering emails, etc.?
This is a big listening time for me: busywork, design projects – anything that doesn’t require my studio audio path is an opportunity for me to be listening to music. It really depends… I’m in the car a lot, too, doing family stuff, so always listening to music there as well. I’ve got a USB drive with my entire music library on it, minus most of the ambient stuff, as i don’t find that ambient music and driving works… But my musical tastes and car listening habits are somewhat wide, from ‘90s hip-hop to The Beatles to new wave, more modern alternative (the National, LCD, Death Cab, etc), indie folk, etc etc. Lately a lot of Radiohead and The Smile and A Tribe Called Quest. I don’t use streaming services, so I keep my digital music library in iTunes (or whatever it’s called now) as well as in the car.
When I’m in one of the studios, and not working, it’s an opportunity to listen to more subtle and more ambient music as well as the aforementioned stuff. I go to sleep every night listening to music and that’s always ambient, always beatless. I usually rotate sleeping music every couple of weeks. This week i’ve returned to Marcus Fischer’s Dodecalogues. Last week it was Harold Budd.
Name an underrated musician from the past 50 years.
That’s a tough one, because I think that most of my peers are underrated in the grand scheme of music. Underrated to who, I guess is the question. To the general public? To the ambient community? But going back 50 years takes us way out of the ambient music territory. I’m going to keep it closer to heart here and give a shout out to the UK ambient artist Andrew Chalk. I absolutely adore his releases and for a long time they were only available from him on CD and not terribly easy to come by. A couple years back he finally put his entire catalog – and it’s a big one – on Bandcamp and I was able to really dig into so much I hadn’t heard. I think more people need to hear Andrew’s music.
What are you working on next?
Now that Sti.ll is finished and a flurry of press that Joe and I did is over, I can start thinking about my next serious full-length album. I’ll be looking to release that in the first half of 2025 and want to explore some different directions. In the meantime, the third of my three EPs, following Eev and Aer, called Ash, is scheduled to come out around October. This one is probably my favorite of the three as I’ve leaned into noise sources (my sonic representation of “ash”) so it’s slightly grittier at times. While I’m known for using noise in a lo-fi, tape sort of way, Ash actually brings that noise forward and uses it more like an instrument, to a degree. It was a little path I went down while writing the music and not something I had explored too much before.
I’m also midway through a handful of collaborative projects that are sounding great. It’s just tough to balance the workload and find time to create music outside of the very busy mastering schedule. But I manage! Staying endlessly curious helps.
