Stephan Mathieu & Taylor Deupree
Transcriptions

This record left our Ant feeling happy.

This Stephan Mathieu + Taylor Deupree 'Transcriptions' CD is very posh looking in its oversized A5 package. This is a very interesting collaboration which involved Mathieu playing wax cylinders and 78's through portable gramophones then recording into computer via microphone. Deupree than adds vintage synths and guitar. The results are very captivating and dreamlike. I'm reminded of the warm decaying fuzz of William Basinski and even some Machinefabriek stuff. Little bits of Phillip Jeck and Thomas Koner possibly. It's kinda difficult to make comparisons but if you like those artists then there should be something here for you to enjoy as it's most pleasant on the ear. It's like wrapping yourself up in a big warm bobbled wooly blanket. Out through Spekk.

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Sound clips for Transcriptions

Nocturne Play

Largo Play

Solitude Play

Remain Play

Andante Play

Genius Play

White Heaven Play

Solitude of Spheres Play

What their label says...

'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.

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