Artist : Stephan Mathieu & Taylor Deupree
Title : Transcriptions
Genre : Ambient
Year : 2009
Date : 07/03/2009
Bitrate : VBR kbps
Tracks : 08
Label : Spekk
Source : CDDA
Encoder : Lame 3.97
Length : 48:53 min
Size : 63,6 MB
Tracklist:
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01.Nocturne 04:22
02.Largo 03:33
03.Solitude 05:40
04.Remain 06:00
05.Andante 06:11
06.Genius 05:24
07.White Heaven 12:03
08.Solitude Of Spheres 05:40
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48:53 min
Text by Will Long (Celer)
'Transcriptions', a collaborative work by Stephan Mathieu and Taylor Deupree, contains 8 tracks of music
that is both historic, decayed, angelic and revolving, while also existing in warmth, purity, and
transcendence through acoustic instruments, and vintage synthesizer.
Delving deeply into the history of the earliest recording methods through mechanical phonographs,
Stephan Mathieu created a method using wax-cylinders, the predecessor of records, as well as 78s, which
have a larger frequency range, to create his music through playback of these pieces of musical history.
With a setup consisting of playing the cylinders through two portable gramophones, and then sending them
directly into the computer by microphone, Mathieu was able to record the sounds, and perform software
processing in realtime, rendering a resulting flow of deteriorated angelic elegance, decomposed beauty,
and reborn awakenings.
From this result, Taylor Deupree worked with the recordings, adding acoustic instruments and vintage
synthesizer; adding-to, while still maintaining the physicality of the 78s, opening the range of the tracks
through unalloyed analog contributions. Upon first listening, it might be thought that the contributions of
Taylor Deupree were merely additions to original material, but when listening further, once the music has
breathed openly, it can be heard actually how much the cylinder recordings of Stephan Mathieu shape the
open pathways of Deupree's acoustics, allowing for a breadth of incredible range. Not merely a
compliment, but a modern counterpart.
Through nearly 48 minutes of music, self-described as warm and enveloping, these sounds represent the
pivotal movements of the unique, the saturated, and the exploratory, all colliding in what may be
sometimes a wave of revolving fuzz, swirling melodies of the supernatural and the human, the delicate
echoes of single revolutions, and gentle plucks of the guitar. It is both a conversation, and a translation of
both sides. Transcription, after all, means notating the unnotated.
The result of the century-apart sources combined with the methodology and talent of these two leading
experimentalists creates an immutable, impressing magnetism, while still balancing so gently on the
vibrations of the decayed, and the frail humanity of the past.
http://www.spekk.net/