(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
LP: Thank you both for making time. It's such a treat. I've been immersed in the world of Sti.ll for the last couple of days. To a large extent, I think that speaks to the success, not only of the music but of the format. There's been so much to take in—the backstory and the FOLIO element creates a universe to get lost in as a listener. I think the format is very effective.
Joseph Branciforte: That's really great to hear. We definitely put a lot of work into it—obviously the music was its own journey, but it's nice to hear that the book has resonated as well.
Taylor Deupree: When we started, I remember Joe constantly saying, "We've gone this far, basically, we're going all in." I don't think we really knew what it was going to be at first. We knew it would be some sort of digital streaming release at the very least, but we had to think about the vinyl to a degree because we were limited to the length of the sides. We didn't want them to be too short, and they obviously couldn't be too long. The vinyl was the first thing that dictated how long the pieces would be. When Joe started doing the FOLIOs, the first one with Kenneth Kirschner, this was just a natural fit. I agree, it's made so much to talk about and so many angles for people to come to it from. Every other release going forward is going to pale in comparison.
LP: I want to dig deeper into the format, but I want to save that for later in our conversation. As I was doing my background reading, the very last sentence of the Pitchfork review leapt off the page. I'm not sure if either of you have read it, but the sentence says, "Sometimes if you shoot to do the impossible, you actually achieve it." I read that late in my research, and it really seemed to encapsulate the vibe of where you were. Maybe not necessarily through the whole project, but certainly reading quotes from you both, there were various stages where it was like, "Is this actually viable and doable? Is this going to be achievable?" Much like my impression of how I experienced consuming the project, it was interesting to see a reviewer really get that experience you had.
Joseph Branciforte: As you mentioned, at various stages, I wasn't totally convinced we would actually be able to pull it off. Taylor could speak to this as well because he proposed the initial seed of this whole idea, and obviously the record we are reimagining is his work. To a large extent, the parameters were defined and imagined by Taylor, but from my perspective, there was a murkiness to it in the beginning.
I was such a fan of the original Stil. album, the electronic version from 2002. The Pitchfork review hinted at this, but you could do such a great job with a translation like this, and it's still always going to be compared to that original one. It always, in a way, can't really fully stand on its own. There's this shadow hanging over it where you're not making a fresh work—you're making something that's going to be compared. People are going to listen to them back to back and try to compare and say, "How did they do this? And how did they do that?"
It was interesting for me because usually when you make a record, it's not like that. It's fresh terrain and you're out in the open. This one, there was always that shadow looming of the older one, knowing they'd be listened to back to back. As I mentioned in the book, I had my doubts about it from that perspective. But ultimately, as we started getting into it musically, it started to leap off the page and become its own thing. It convinced me that not only was it worth doing in an academic sense, but sonically we were getting somewhere really new and exciting. That's when it changed from something I was nervous about to something I became more excited by.
LP: Taylor, I'm intrigued—and I want to level set on the language—how do you refer to this? Is this a reimagining? Is that the right way to say it? Is it a recreation? Is it a reinterpretation? I know it's weird to get hung up on semantics, but I kept coming back to how one refers to this.
Taylor Deupree: We settled on "reimagining" in the press release. I think that's a good term for it. It's not a remix, but "rework" or "reimagining" is totally valid. That's what we've been calling it.
LP: Were you aware of, or had you maybe even after the fact thought of, any other artists who went back and revisited an early work in such a dramatic fashion? Do you see yourself as fitting within something like that?
Taylor Deupree: I know a lot of artists have done it. The first thing that comes to mind for me are the live ensemble works of William Basinski's. They've done "Disintegration Loops" with a large ensemble. I don't think there's a recording of that beyond maybe some live recordings. That's probably the closest that I can think of, at least among people in our circle. I know that Sigur Rós have been recently working with a big orchestra and performing with, I think, a fairly giant orchestra, redoing some of their works.
Going back to the previous question, when I set out to do this, even before I contacted Joe, I had no idea how deep we'd go with it. My initial experiments on my own were just with a xylophone and an electric piano, and all I was out to do was capture the essence. I probably would have been totally happy if that's what we ended up doing—just going by ear and recreating them with a new set of instruments. I think that was what was in my head initially.
LP: Almost like variations or something.
Taylor Deupree: Yeah, nothing super serious, but when I handed it off to Joe and he came back with a first demo, like a three-minute little demo, and showed me the scores, I was pretty blown away. I had no idea he would somehow pick these abstract pieces apart, note by note and frequency by frequency, and reconstruct it with so much detail. As soon as we had those initial scores done and we had that initial five-minute piece with the clarinetist, that's when it clicked that we figured it would probably work to this degree. I wasn't imagining it to be this level of detail, but I'm happy it is in the end.
LP: One of the anecdotes that stood out for me early on in the FOLIO essays was the notion that you had two rules or governing principles when you went into this: one being the idea of everything being recorded with microphones, nothing plugged into a desk or computer. The other was that you would allow some changes—there wasn't this idea that you were fetishizing the original. But then there's also this notion about fidelity that comes up in a later part of the essays.
When I read the piece about allowing for changes, that landed for me in a very specific way in that it also allows it to not feel like a stunt or devolve into kitsch. Like, "Look what we did," because it doesn't have a hand-wavy element to it at all. In fact, to read some of the writing that others have done about the reimagination, how it recasts the work as a contemporary classical piece—and I apologize if that's how the first rendition had been perceived as well, although it didn't land for me that way initially. It's fascinating, that ability to give yourself room, to not have to be so beholden to the original while still having its essence, but then this aspect of Joe really going in deep. There's a little bit of tension in all those elements, and if you were to over-index for any one of them, it would be a much different outcome.
Joseph Branciforte: It's interesting what you're saying about the tension between fidelity and allowing this project to be its own thing sonically. I think a very neat way to explain that would be that I was more the fidelity guy and Taylor was more the "let's loosen this up." That's a simplification, but I think I came to it very much in the beginning as more of a fan, and I didn't want to do a disservice and have this project turn into this very loose thing where it was like, "Yeah, it's a couple notes from the original release and we just jam on it for twenty minutes and it's vaguely the same."
That could be interesting musically, but conceptually, when Taylor sent the initial email with this project, the interest was in getting to the essence of the structure. Why do these pieces work on the original album? To me, it transcended just the idea of there being pitch collections or anything like that. It was really the specific interactions between timbre and spectrum and form, with this idea of repetition and different loops repeating over one another in different lengths.
There was something about the structure that made the original record successful. In conceptualizing how to achieve this acoustically, I was pretty adamant that I didn't want to lose those aspects. We can make an ambient record with acoustic instruments, and that's fine, and that can be beautiful, but I don't know if that's what makes Stil. the original Stil., what gives it its identity.
There was a tension there because, as you said, it can devolve into a kind of fetish character where it's like, "Look what we can do, we can make an electronic sound on a clarinet." We didn't want it to become that either. Hopefully, the end product walks that line where it both honors the original but also allows this one to be its own thing, because otherwise it becomes a simulacrum of the original. We wanted this to be able to stand independent at the end of the day.
LP: In one of the essays, the use of microphones was referred to as a concession because the microphone itself is electronic and was sort of one breach of the "everything must be completely acoustic and moving through the air" rule. I haven't read too much about the performance back in May, but do you see a world in which you could present this music in an environment with no amplification? Would there be something closer to the spirit of that rule? Is that of interest?
Joseph Branciforte: You theoretically could do a number of these pieces. I can think of a few that should work pretty well just totally acoustic without amplification. For me though—I think Taylor would probably agree—the record is a record. It probably could work as a live performance, but that's not really what we were after. We were after a sort of recorded document, and the microphones are an element of that, but a couple of them ended up getting shaped pretty dramatically in post-production.
I don't mean in terms of effects or anything—I just mean that we weren't always trying to think of it as performable. It's more like we're making a new tapestry here. While I think some of them could certainly be done that way, ultimately, I'm a recording engineer and I think of the microphone as a sort of instrument in its own right. The mic placement and how we captured these sounds was all done with a lot of specificity, and to me that's part of what makes this sound like it does. I don't know if it would work as a live thing. It probably would, but I'm happy with the recorded work as it is.
Taylor Deupree: Just to touch on that, I think it would be possible—we would need a lot of players. To run a fifteen-minute piece, we're talking there's sometimes fifteen clarinet layers going on at once, and that's what Joe's talking about with the post-production. Madison Greenstone, who's our clarinetist, isn't performing the entire song in one take. It's fifteen or so layers of different pitches of clarinet, really wild and difficult breathing techniques and mouth techniques.
You would need at least that many clarinetists and then probably break them down into each one playing for five minutes and then swapping with another one at the same pitch. To perform Sti.ll, it would probably take thirty clarinetists. I think it's possible—I mean, I'd love to see that one day.
Joseph Branciforte: If anyone wants to commission it, I'll rearrange it for a large ensemble version, but it would be its own thing, I think.
Taylor Deupree: It's that kind of thing. Like Joe said, we weren't playing with post-production effects and things like that. It was just more layering and editing to build up. When you look at the scores note by note, they're pretty complex.
LP: Taylor, to wind back the clock a little bit, Joe used some of the keywords around minimalism as it relates to a musical movement—repetition, the out-of-phase tempos, some of those hallmarks of some of the more prominent composers in that movement. Where were you at as a musician and as a listener in the '90s and early 2000s? Were you already hyper-aware of these players and composers? Did you view yourself in that context? Where were you seated, and I mean less about where the public may or may not have perceived you, but what was your self-conception? What were you trying to do?
Taylor Deupree: I was very much into minimalism, but less so musically. I wasn't listening and still don't really listen to a lot of the classic minimalists, if you think Philip Glass or Steve Reich or things like that. I haven't heard those pieces very much. My interest in minimalism came from visual art and architecture. My musical minimalism came more from Brian Eno and my other contemporaries who were doing quieter work. I always thought of my minimalism more in a quiet sense than necessarily a structural sense.
But Stil. in particular was very much influenced by the Seascapes photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto. I was looking at a lot of minimalist architecture, Tadao Ando in particular, Donald Judd sculpture, that classic sort of minimalist school of visual art was really influential to me. I was much more interested in making sure that my music was influenced by non-musical artists' sources, more so than musical sources. I feel like if I'm being influenced by another musician, then I would tend to try to sound like that musician, and I don't want to do that—I'm sure many artists don't. So to translate the visual minimalism onto music was something that was very much what I was doing back then and still do to this day.
LP: Interesting. You bring up a topic that I've talked with other artists here about over the years: this idea of listening and influence. I've had artists say they don't listen to a lot of music anymore or they listen to music far outside of the music they create so that it's almost the same outcome as what you talked about of taking in visual art or design aesthetic and channeling it into your music. They might take something that's genre-wise very different and it's in the gestalt while they're creating it in a completely different form, whereas they might not want to listen to something adjacent to what they're doing for fear of inadvertently cribbing it or mimicking it.
But it's interesting, you both are in—while they're well-equipped—fairly minimal environments. Your walls aren't covered in posters or art, and I'm playing armchair theoretician here, but there's an aesthetic here that feels very consistent with the artwork that you both produce, the music. There's an interesting continuity across.
Taylor Deupree: We're both sitting in our studios and the bare walls that you see are all acoustic wall, basically fabric walls and things like that. My walls are literally made of fabric. Both of our walls and ceilings are fabric. There's not a lot of things you can hang on those walls.
Joseph Branciforte: I think generally both of us are into visual minimalism. I was always a big fan of Taylor's 12k label and visual aesthetics and graphic design. What Taylor hit on about a lot of the inspiration for this kind of music coming out of visual art and graphic design—for me, graphic design is a big parallel inspiration and just design in general.
I've said this in some other interview, but I think about this a lot: sometimes I find it really odd that I am a musician. It doesn't feel like a really deep part of my identity, even though I'm doing it twelve-plus hours a day. There's something like—I feel like I could easily do something else. The music part just feels like what I'm really interested in is attention and focus and problem-solving.
I think that can really transcend mediums. The idea that it's manifested in sound to me sometimes almost feels arbitrary. It could be food or looking at nature or visual art or designing your home or different materials that you might choose to have in your kitchen. If you have that intentional, thoughtful process, it almost feels to me that that's where the music stems from in its ideal form, and the fact that it's sound is not necessarily essential.
So I don't know if that's unique to me. I'm sure there's a ton of artists—I don't know if you would agree with that, Taylor, but I also came up through this sort of adjacent to a conservatory thing, which I don't think Taylor did—he more has a photography degree. I came up around composers and doing this kind of more traditional music thing. I felt very much an outlier in that sense. While I was really serious and I still am a big classical music listener, it's not the only part of my identity as an artist. What Taylor was doing with his label always resonated with me and still does because it feels like it draws on those other disciplines and mediums, and it doesn't make sound and music the only thing that's happening. There are some other dimensions to it that are really fascinating.
LP: There's such an intentionality and an integration of those other forms. You mentioned the obvious one being the design aesthetic. It's really interesting to go to—and we'll link to this from the show notes—but to go to the Bandcamp page because you can see the thumbnails of all the albums next to each other and you really get—don't scold me for saying it this way—but you get a sense of the brand identity. You can feel that this is a context, this is a thing.
Taylor Deupree: You don't have to apologize for the term "brand" because when I started 12k, branding was hugely important. Obviously it's in a much smaller sense—we're not talking about a big corporate brand here, but when I began advertising the label, back in the day I'd do magazine ads and print ads when there were more print magazines. I was always advertising the label, not individual releases.
I think an ad for an individual release would just sort of be forgotten about in a month or something. But I was hammering home the label aesthetic, the idea that if you like one release on the label, you'll probably like all of them. So it was about a visual identity and a sonic identity. Of course there are variations, but I don't think branding in that sense is a bad word or has to be a bad word, especially when you're on our scale.
I guess I felt it easier to have a label where things were a little more under control like that, as opposed to just doing whatever and having every release be different. It would be a lot more work, I think, in the end. Some labels do that—obviously the big labels do that and it can be great. But when you're a one-person operation, honing in on a design template for the releases and getting everything down to a science helps the workflow. It helps the identity, and it gives a brand, a family, an aesthetic.
Joseph Branciforte: Sometimes when you're just randomly browsing the internet, you're bombarded with all these out-of-context pieces of information, whether it be music or news articles or photos or design blogs or whatever—just different stuff that's coming across your feed. And when you find a website that has this sense of order and coherence and curation, to me, it's very relieving. I feel I can take a breath, and I'm like, there's thought and intentional structure to this. There's so much to dig into, and I don't feel the need any longer to surf around. I can just remain here and be comfortable. It's almost meditative.
We're talking about design choices and web design, but on a larger level, we're talking about coherence and unity of thought. This maybe gets into something we would talk about later with this FOLIO series that I've been trying to do, but I'm always trying to find ways to integrate these components into something that feels really coherent so that there's a lot to dig into for listeners and fans if they choose to. Not everyone's going to engage on that super deep level and that's okay too. If they just enjoy the music, that's great, but I like the idea that there's this kind of small universe that you can get lost in, like with Taylor's label and hopefully the kind of stuff I'm trying to build with greyfade, where you can sort of really get deep into it and nerd out a bit.
LP: It's interesting because there is a somatic experience in there that you talk about, Joe, that I could relate to. I don't have an off-the-dome example, but I know what you mean where when you encounter something that feels—like the thoughtfulness of design and especially interface design in this sort of modern era or even with your equipment. When something feels like someone thought about how the recipient might experience it, you can feel the relaxation. And I think the extension of that is the openness now to what's going on.
When Taylor was originally talking about this, I thought about—if I go downstairs to my record collection, I have one area where it's floor-to-ceiling shelves. It just so happens, through no design of my own, that the J's are right around eye level. And I can see the section where the John Coltrane records are, and within that there's the orange and black section of the Impulse records. I go to those records quite frequently.
But more importantly, you think about that design aesthetic for that era of that label, and I'm sure that there were lots of people who bought everything on Impulse because they knew what that orange and black spine stood for—some type of challenging creative music. I think of ECM. They don't quite have the same uniformity, but there is certainly that aesthetic in the sound and in the production and in the visual interface. And it's sort of the best of what a brand can be, which is that if you go there, you may not love everything equally that comes from a label, but you can trust that it's going to be interesting or earnest or within a certain genre or whatever the association is. It's nice to have those shorthands, even more so in this world where there's like, please somebody tell me where to begin. Anybody, give me a way in.
Taylor Deupree: I think labels, like small labels like ours, really serve as curators. Like you said, just like a good entry point. There are so many great little labels out there that are consistent. Generally, if you like one of the releases, you may not love them all, but at least you sort of know what you're getting into and then you can start rabbit-holing from there, following an individual artist's path through other labels. It's something that both Joe and I use to make sense and to try to organize the craziness that's entailed with running labels and doing everything else we do.
Joseph Branciforte: I feel more and more, the more I run a label, I recognize how difficult and special it is to maintain that kind of consistency, like the way Taylor's done or the way ECM or some of these other labels have. It feels like all the forces are conspiring to not allow that to continue.
Taylor Deupree: Yeah.
Joseph Branciforte: I don't even mean it in some conspiratorial way, but I get so many demos of music that I'm like, "This is great." It has nothing to do with what I'm putting out, but it's amazing. And I'm often tempted to just broaden the scope of this to become something really wide-ranging, but I've tried to resist that. It's a question that I struggle with sometimes, because the music I'm putting out on greyfade is a very small sliver of actually the music that I'm interested in as a listener.
I'm sure if you came and hung out with me or Taylor, you'd see that all the music we listen to doesn't sound like what's on our labels. I mean, I'm listening to all kinds of stuff that sounds nothing like what I'm putting out, but I feel that it's important to have that consistency. I do struggle with it but I think that like you're saying, it's helpful to kind of have a point of reference and not constantly have the floor shifting beneath them where they're like "What is this thing?" They understand what they're getting and they're not getting a hip-hop release now or something.
Taylor Deupree: Some advice to your young label from my old label is something that I've done a number of times is to every now and then throw a curveball out there. The first curveball I remember throwing was the CD by Christopher Willits called Folding, and the Tea. Chris is known as an ambient artist who uses guitar as his main instrument. You never heard the strum of a guitar on a 12k record since its inception. And we very specifically started his album with the strum of a guitar.
It was the most obvious and acoustic piece of music on that album. I said, "No, I want to start with this piece because people are going to be really confused when they put the CD on." That sort of launched a whole thing into guitar music for me. That album wasn't such a curveball as a whole, but just that one sound was. Or like fast forward to when I released music from Scottish singer-songwriter Gareth Dixon. And this is straight-up singer-songwriter, acoustic guitar, vocals, that's it. There's nothing like that on the label, there never has been before, completely stands as an anomaly on the label.
I just love his music. And when you listen to it, you're like, this kind of works in a weird way. You can listen to Stil. or Chris Willits's music or any of the other music, and you'd put on Gareth Dixon and you'd probably like it. It just has similar qualities that I'm looking for in a quietness and things like that. Every now and then just throwing out a weird curveball, not making a whole turn, but just like a weird release every now and then kind of keeps listeners on their toes, I've found. Like, "Oh, this is interesting. He's not narrow," because it is easy to get stuck in these super generic, just like, "Oh, it's another 12k thing. It's just the same old thing."
12k has been running since '97, and I struggle with that all the time. How do I not just keep doing the same thing, release after release? Sometimes these curveballs are just weird little curveballs, or sometimes they open up a whole thing for you. You got to stay willing to accept changes and just go with the flow.
LP: As you were both elaborating on this point, and to go back to where Joe started, I think that artists and label owners like the two of you—and I think it might be specific to artist-owned labels or creator-owned labels, as opposed to being like a kid with a dream who wants to just—people buy into your creative journey and your aesthetic. So Joe, to your point, if you put out a hip-hop record, I'd be really interested because I'd want to know what's Joe's take on hip-hop? What does he think is interesting?
Joseph Branciforte: Maybe the point being, though, that I feel like that is only interesting in the context of what you already know the brand to be, meaning like—
Taylor Deupree: Right. Because it would be weird. It would be.
Joseph Branciforte: Right? Like you have to establish that baseline from which to deviate, because I feel like maybe that's the point you're making, Taylor. You have that liberty to deviate because people are like, "Oh, this is something different." Whereas if you just start a label and you're just putting out a bunch of random stuff, there's no tension involved. There's no boldness in that choice to make a different move. So I think in a way we're kind of all pointing to the same thing that coherence is still what ties it together. And those moments where you deviate from it are even more—they're even more radical in that context or whatever.
LP: The diametric opposite of that is someone like Bill Laswell because his sort of artistic brand is this genre hopping and this genre mashup. He had an imprint throughout the nineties called Axiom, and I bought every Axiom release. It's some of my favorite music even now that I go back to repeatedly, but there's no two records in a row that are even remotely the same. They might have some of the same players on them, but they're doing completely different things. But it's because you're buying into his creative universe, which is, what's this guy going to cook up next?
Joseph Branciforte: Yeah, for sure.
LP: There was a quote I read from you, Taylor, that said that Stil. was the blueprint that your music would reference for many years. And I'm curious about what that means. I can bring a lot of interpretation to that, but I'm wondering, what was that for you? How did you mean that?
Taylor Deupree: Two ways, really. The first of what I touched on before was really being influenced by outside visual art. Stil. was probably the first release that really said, okay, there's these photographs I love, there's Seascapes by Hiroshi Sugimoto. I set out specifically to do the musical equivalent of those photographs. And I haven't been quite so deliberate since then, but that definitely kicked off this "let's make sure that my music is influenced by other forms of art."
So it was that, and it was also, sonically, the use of loops. I came up in the early mid-'90s as a techno artist. Our drum machines were looping. We were—303s were looping. When I sort of drastically shifted gears in '97 to wanting to pursue ambient music, Stil. was really the first time that I specifically made the loop the sort of bed of most of my music. And specifically like multiple asynchronous loops.
That's something that was all over Stil. and something that is still the bedrock of my music today. Almost everything I do starts with some guitar pedal looper doing a repeated passage. So it's just this idea of repetition that's always in the back of my mind, but not strict repetition. It's always subtle changes. Very subtle changes among these strict repeating patterns, and that compositionally has been the way I've been thinking about music since then. Yeah, it really was the blueprint in the start of how I'm still working today.
LP: We'll make sure to link to that photographic work as well because it becomes very apparent what you're talking about when you look at the subtle variation in those series of photographs, especially when they're presented the way you did like in a grid or side by side. You can really map onto how it relates to the music.
Taylor Deupree: There are photos that if you—what I took away from the book when I first saw it was all these pictures look the same. You flip through the book and they're like, "This is all the same damn photograph." But you slow down a little bit and you're like, wait, these are all radically different from each other. And it just gets you to appreciate the subtle differences and the light.
I had the fortunate experience two years ago, I think it was now, maybe even three—Sugimoto built himself a museum in Japan, and I forgot the name of the town, but it's sort of across the bay from Kamakura, not that far from Tokyo. It's this amazing, huge grounds of different buildings and orange orchards and stuff, and he has amazing galleries jutting out over the ocean with his original works hanging in them. And it's his own place. It was like a religious experience for me.
There's even a hallway that you can walk down—at the end of the hallway, it's just an open—this big structure is made of rusted Cor-Ten steel. On the end of this long hundred-or-more-feet hallway is open to the air. And if you stand at just the right spot, because it's looking out over the ocean, it creates a real-time live seascape photograph right in front of you. It's incredible. But I encourage your listeners to go look at his photographs.
LP: I don't know if you guys remember, but I came across an interview that Joe did with you, actually, for Tiny Mix Tapes in 2017.
Taylor Deupree: I don't remember that.
LP: One of the things you said in that interview, Taylor, was that if somebody were to start a label today, it wouldn't be enough to just offer CDs and downloads because anybody could do that. And you said they probably need to do something different, maybe even something radical with the way the music was distributed and sold. I thought, how funny, because as I'm flipping through the PDF and hopefully one day the book, this is quite radical. Not subversive, I don't think, but in today's environment, certainly a bold thing to be doing. And it's very funny to me that you don't remember that because it seems like in a way it might have been part of the genesis or the origin story for how you guys got to where you got to with the FOLIO.
Joe, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about FOLIO in the context of this work and the choices that were made that went into the FOLIO. But also, I'm so sort of taken with the idea that you keep referring to it as a format. I love that. So could you talk about sort of the vision for the format as well?
Joseph Branciforte: I've been thinking about starting a label for many years and been a fan of and always trying to look at how labels progress and what they're doing and what they're bringing to the equation. I started my label greyfade back in 2019. We started doing vinyl and digital download with no streaming. That was kind of a decision I made in the beginning. The reason this relates to the FOLIO thing is because when I was assessing what formats I wanted to do for the label, I went with vinyl initially because I felt it was the best listener experience in terms of engagement.
It gives you a lot of, as everyone talks to death, it just gives you a really nice canvas to work with for the artwork, for liner notes. It's a very intentional kind of listening experience where you can sit down and put on the vinyl and listen to a side and really take it in without any of the distractions of the internet.
And the more I thought about that, I just thought that the streaming platforms were really running—for me, were running counter to that kind of engagement that I want to promote with the label.
Fast forward to a few years ago, I kept thinking down this road and I started to think, what would be the logical extension of that? Because it seems that if that's what we're looking to do, we're looking to kind of provide more context for the work, we're looking to kind of engage not only listeners in terms of the music itself, but the dialogue that goes on and the sort of whole universe of events that conspired to make a record come into being and not only the history of those individual people, but their own influences.
And I thought about myself with records that I love, going back and trying to find out all the technical details and reading interviews with, what kind of gear was used and, like Taylor was saying, like, what kind of art books were they checking out at that time? And what were they doing and what was their life like? I just love all that context.
And for me, this FOLIO format came about as a way of doing two things. First was to scratch that itch to provide people with context. It's a book. You can dig into it. There's essays, there's studio photography. There's—in this case of Sti.ll there's scores, you know, the complete arrangement of the entire record is there as a score. It's another thing as a composer and arranger that I love doing is just buying score books and I'll sit in bed, you know, while listening to string quartet or something and read through the score. I just really like that form of engaging with it, it just gives me a different way to enter into the music.
So I thought that was another cool thing. But the other thing I think about a lot is that we really haven't advanced very far beyond these kind of antiquated formats. Really the last major shift that happened was to go to the digital download. Streaming, I guess you could say, was another advancement. But as far as physical media, really the last one was the CD.
And for me, I love physical media, but I'm not sure it always makes complete sense to keep relying on these antiquated fifty, sixty, seventy-year-old mediums. Although the book I guess is even older, but the idea behind it is really to say, to put front and center the idea of the engagement being the core element of the physical release rather than an actual medium for the music.
So the book has a high-resolution digital download, or you can stream it directly from within the book, but it's kind of just putting front and center that context and that need for kind of engaging with the music and the art on a deeper level. So that's kind of the reasoning behind it.
LP: It's really stunning. As you were articulating in the beginning some of the intention around it, it struck me all of this information exists out there, but it requires again that sort of bifurcation of your time and energy that the internet requires of you. So I could go create a virtual FOLIO around this record and read the interviews with you and go to the Bandcamp page and go to the label website and sort of what I did for this podcast preparation and have the music on in the background and like, okay, I experienced a FOLIO-like thing, but it's much different when—and it's the word you guys have both used a few times—when it's curated and presented as part of the art. This is our intention for you to experience what we've done.
Taylor, in an interview, you sort of admitted in what print looked like a sheepish way that you like streaming and that you listen to a lot of streaming music.
Taylor Deupree: No, I don't actually. I don't actually listen to streaming music.
LP: Oh, it's interesting. I thought the interview said you did.
Taylor Deupree: No, I don't. Actually, I don't subscribe to any streaming services. All of 12k's music is available on them because I think it's a necessary evil. But I buy all my music, whether it's on Apple's iTunes or whatever they call it, or Bandcamp. I buy most of my music digitally and listen to it either in the studio from iTunes or in my car from a USB drive. The only time Spotify comes up in the house is when my son uses it to bring up a guitar song to learn, because he has access to everything, but we don't subscribe to any of the services.
It's sort of the same reason I don't listen to radio or never listen to radio much. I know what I want to listen to and I have all my music organized and I know exactly where it is. So if I want to listen to The National, I can go and listen to it right away. I don't have to go through some streaming interface or wait for the radio to play the song or whatever. The streaming thing, I don't like it. I think I wish it would go away—that's an entire other conversation. I prefer it not to exist, but I keep the music on there because that's the way the public has spoken. That's the way they want to listen to music. So I'd rather my music be out there than not. So it's a necessary evil. And if it all disappears tomorrow, I won't shed a tear, but for the meantime, the public has said this is what we want.
LP: It's an interesting point you make and it's probably a discussion for another day, but I would love to have the discussion some other day with either or both of you, which is this idea of, I'm not sure the public has spoken. I can give you all kinds of things that are economically unfair or unviable or that are clever ideas.
Taylor Deupree: Right.
LP: And of course you'll take it. Because you're like, wow, everything for ten bucks a month.
Taylor Deupree: True.
LP: But I don't know that the walls were being banged on for that. It's great that it exists, but it's not great for everybody.
Joseph Branciforte: I made this analogy in another interview we did recently, and I kind of liked it, which is like, if you think about the organic food movement or farmers markets and this kind of thing—it's a slightly different argument, I guess. But there are parallels in the sense of like, if you just want the cheapest, crappiest meat, factory-farmed meat at the lowest price, you can go to Walmart or whatever.
But these movements have succeeded in convincing people that you want organic food. You want direct relationships with your producers. You want to go to your farmer's market and meet the farmers and know where you're getting your stuff from. And while I have no illusions that either of our labels are ever going to be some smashing financial success, I do like to think that given the small modicum of control that I have that it's worth at least having the conversation, trying to promote and bring awareness to the idea that if we want to keep making these kind of projects, like these FOLIO-type things that take many years to make, the economic model of streaming is not what's getting us there.
I mean, I feel lucky that I'm able to do what I do. I have a nice studio. I work with artists and I'm able to make the kind of music I want, but none of that is free. And I feel it's very important that, for me to pay other artists whose music I listen to for their work, because I know how hard it is to make these records. So anyway, that's my small pitch on it. But I kind of agree that I think the public sometimes when you explain the reasoning to them, I have friends that aren't musicians. If I explain the reasoning of how little money makes it back to the artists and how it's really much better to just go on Bandcamp and buy the vinyl or buy the download, they're like, "Oh, okay, well, then I'll do that." A lot of people just seem to kind of not even know that it's an issue.
Taylor Deupree: They're not totally aware. The other—I think the worst thing about this or the most sinister thing is that there's an entire generation of kids growing up who assume and think that music, all music is free. That's really dangerous because as soon as you replace us with AI music and people aren't used to paying for it anyway, then there's a real danger to creativity.
But you look at kids these days and they're not buying records. Music's free on YouTube. If you want to pay the ten bucks a month for Spotify, you can, but you don't need to and you have access to everything. So why on earth would they ever pay for music? Especially at children's age, you know, a teenager or something, they probably aren't working and don't have a lot of money to pay for music, but they're learning from a young age that music is free and they will take that with them through their adult years and probably continue to not want to pay for music. That's what I think the real scary part is.
LP: I think there's something really interesting to be learned from what Joe was saying, though, about the food movements. And there are probably lessons that can be applied here in terms of even communication with the public. It's fascinating. I want to meditate on that, Joe. That's really interesting.
The final point I'd make on that is the—I think overall, and it's a rant that I've been developing lately, is the technology and the technologist's focus on making life better for the consumer. This idea that customer obsession is a worthy thing at the expense of all else, lowest price, most convenience, fastest thing—I don't necessarily value that. That just makes a culture of petulant people who just want everything now as cheaply as possible. If you play that tape till it ends, that's not a pretty picture.
Taylor Deupree: The problem is though is that we're all old enough to know that it used to be different, right? That there was—that there's an alternative way or, we all know that records exist and yeah, if you want the organic, if you want to go to the farmer's market, you can, because we know that those options exist. But for a young kid, they don't know how it used to be. And maybe it's just because we're old and always think that things used to be better, but—
Joseph Branciforte: Possibly. I would just add one thing to that, which is that my parents who are in their late seventies now, they're as bad as anyone with the streaming and all this stuff. And I've seen the kind of regression that's happened with them where they used to buy CDs and they used to buy records. And now it's like, my mom will just queue up stuff on YouTube.
So I don't know that it's necessarily an age thing. I think it's like just the path of least resistance. It's always easy. But it's like we talk about with coffee, it's like, yeah, you can buy a Keurig and have it dish out your crappy coffee in four seconds. If that's satisfying to you, I mean, it's not—I'm not going to sit here and try to be elitist and be like, although I know I just did call it crappy, but you know, there's nothing that's going to replace for me having that ritual of making my coffee in the morning and spending ten minutes to make that perfect cup.
That's just the kind of person I am. And I guess for me, it kind of relates to everything. It's music, but it kind of gets back to what we talked about in the beginning about how do you want to relate to objects in your life? And do you want to do it in an intentional kind of grounded, slow way? Or do you want everything to be as fast as possible and as easy and cheap as possible?
And I think, yeah, there is this bifurcation there, maybe an approach, but I guess for me, it's worth having the conversation and at least making the case that—yeah, you're gonna pay like for instance these FOLIO books they're not zero dollars, they cost a lot of money to make and I'm not really making any money on these at all, but I think it's worth doing and anyone who says, "I read the book and I really got something out of it and it inspired me to do this and this," I'm like, "Well, and that was a worthwhile endeavor and that really furthered this conversation."
So it's not always about necessarily the bottom line or the easiest thing. Hopefully there are other like-minded people like us who are gonna spend that extra time to make their cup of coffee or to sit down and spend an hour and listen to a record with their headphones on their turntable. So I hold out hope.
Taylor Deupree: Unfortunately there are those people out there, and those are the—are hopefully always going to be music lovers and there's always going to be the ones that want to take the deep dive and, you know, the coffee lovers and the food lovers. And those are the people that we tend to surround ourselves with, I think.
So, you know, our world feels a little sweeter because the people we surround ourselves with enjoy the deep dive into things and the care that go into all different aspects of life. So yeah, I mean Joe said I hope it continues. But I think you know, we do have that audience and we're lucky to have that audience. I do fear that the younger generation, some of them, or a lot of them musically may miss out on a lot of the stuff if they continue just consuming endless streaming music.
LP: Well, listen, you guys have already graciously let me go over. There's still so much more I could talk about with you. I would love to have you both on individually at some point, but I have to close by asking, Taylor, any intention to do this again in twenty-two years?
Taylor Deupree: Maybe I'll do an all electronic version of this record and loop it back, but no, no intention of doing Sti.ll again. I don't think, certainly haven't thought about that.
Joseph Branciforte: Next time we'll have AI re-orchestrate it or something.
Taylor Deupree: Yeah, just redo it. I hope that Joe and I work together again. I think we learned a ton on this record. We went in very naively in the thick of things, like how deeply we had gone for better and for worse, it was expensive to do, it was hard to do, took a lot of time to do, but we came out on the other side, I think both fairly blown away with what we accomplished. And I think it would be a shame not to try doing that again on something, but I hope there'll be another sort of—yeah, another one of these.
