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Taylor Deupree & Joseph Branciforte: reimagining Stil.
Taylor Deupree & Joseph Branciforte: reimagining Stil.
The two renowned experimental musicians, mastering engineers, and label owners discuss how a classic electronic album guided and inspired a…
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Nov. 21, 2024

Taylor Deupree & Joseph Branciforte: reimagining Stil.

The two renowned experimental musicians, mastering engineers, and label owners discuss how a classic electronic album guided and inspired an acoustic masterpiece.

Today, the Spotlight shines On experimental music producers and label owners Taylor Deupree and Joseph Branciforte.

Back in 2002, Taylor Deupree released an electronic album called Stil. That release captivated listeners with its quiet, repeating patterns and stark digital sound. Twenty years later, Taylor and producer Joseph Branciforte linked up to reimagine the album as Sti.ll, rebuilding the entire work using only non-electronic instruments.

The new version takes all of the computer-generated sounds from the original and puts them in the hands of live musicians playing clarinets, strings, and percussion. It is an ambitious and adventurous project from two collaborators enmeshed in experimental music—Taylor runs 12k Music and has spent years blending electronic and natural sounds, while Joe’s built greyfade into a label that keeps finding creative ways to present creative music.

They’re here to walk us through this one-of-a-kind project while covering several other topics related to creativity and the modern music business.

(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from the albums Stil. and Stil.ll, played side-by-side.)

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Joseph Branciforte Profile Photo

Joseph Branciforte

musician, producer, recording engineer

Joseph Branciforte (b. 1985) is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and Grammy award-winning recording engineer & producer based out of New York. He is the founder of the record label greyfade { https://www.greyfade.com }.

Branciforte's wide-ranging musical activity spans acoustic, electronic, and algorithmic composition, performance and improvisation on a variety of acoustic and electronic instruments, and an expansive discography as recording, mixing, and mastering engineer. At the bottom of each of these seemingly discrete threads lies a relentless fascination with sound as a profound emotional medium — organized through musical form, articulated by a careful selection of sound sources, and framed through the act of recording.

He has collaborated closely with artists including Theo Bleckmann, Ben Monder, Kenneth Kirschner, Taylor Deupree, and Jozef Dumoulin. As recording engineer, he has lent his talents to over 300 albums, working with some of the most respected names in jazz and creative music: Bill Frisell, Tim Berne, Vijay Iyer, Chick Corea, Nels Cline, Wadada Leo Smith, Craig Taborn, Marc Ribot, Steve Lehman, and The Westerlies.

In 2019, he founded the greyfade record label in order to present work from artists exploring process-based composition, electronic & acoustic minimalism, and alternative tuning systems. The label’s inaugural release was LP1, a collaboration between vocalist & sound artist Theo Bleckmann and Branciforte on modular synthesizer, Fender Rhodes, and live electronic processing. The album was included on… Read More

taylor deupree Profile Photo

taylor deupree

musician/mastering engineer

(pasted from my site, sorry if it's long)

echnology and imperfection. The raw and the processed. Curator and curated. Solo explorer and gregarious collaborator. The life and work of Taylor Deupree are less a study in contradictions than a portrait of the multidisciplinary artist in a still-young century.

Deupree is an accomplished sound artist whose recordings, rich with abstract atmospherics, have appeared on numerous record labels, and well as in site-specific installations at such institutions as the ICC (Tokyo, Japan) and the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (Yamaguchi, Japan). He started out, in the 1990s, making new noises that edged outward toward the fringes of techno, and in time he found his own path to follow. His music today emphasizes a hybrid of natural sounds and technological mediation. It’s marked by a deep attention to stillness, to an almost desperate near-silence. His passion for the studio as a recording instrument is paramount in his work, but there is no hint of digital idolatry. If anything, his music shows a marked attention to the aesthetics of error and the imperfect beauty of nature, to the short circuits not only in technological systems but in human perception.

And though there is an aura of insularity to Depuree’s work, he is a prolific collaborator, having collaborated with the likes of Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Sylvian, Christian Fennesz, Ichiko Aoba, S. Carey, Stephan Mathieu, Stephen Vitiello, Marcus Fischer, Arovane, Federico Durand, Christopher Willits, Frank Bretschneider, and Tetsu Inoue just to name a… Read More