Taylor Deupree (born April 30, 1971), is an American electronic musician, photographer, graphic designer and mastering engineer. He is most known for the founding of the 12k record label, along with his work as a member of Prototype 909, and his collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Marcus Fischer, Stephan Mathieu, Savvas Ysatis, Christopher Willits and others. In 2008, Taylor Deupree was the Président d'Honneur of the Qwartz Electronic Music Awards 5th in Paris (France).
Starting with simple mastering duties when he worked as the Art Director for Instinct Records in the late 1990s, Deupree's work as a mastering engineer became a steady job around 2008 when he relocated out of the city. He works in a purpose-built studio every day mastering music for clients of all genres, but often specializing in electronic, experimental, modern classical and other forms of alternative music.
One of Deupree's early solo projects, Human Mesh Dance, which was begun in 1993 and ended in 1997 while he worked as the Art Director for Instinct Records was an ambient project that was a strong contrast to Prototype 909's more mainstream techno sound. He released three albums as Human Mesh Dance, along with appearances on numerous ambient compilations. Also in 1993, Deupree teamed up with Savvas Ysatis, a Greek electronic artist, to create several different projects, each with different sounds. SETI produced ambient electronica, with sounds and words from the various SETI projects from around the world. Futique was the duo's trip hop project, and its Detroit techno output was released under the Arc moniker. In 1996, the duo formed the short-lived label Index, which released only a single 12" EP, containing four tracks by various artists.
Deupree founded 12k on January 1, 1997, based on the name of the first Arc album, 12k. On the name 12k:
It first came about when Savvas and I named our first Arc CD (on kk records) 12k. We did so because all of the sequencer files for the tracks on the album ended up having file sizes of 12k. It was an intriguing and mysterious title..so we took it for the album. A year later, when i was thinking of label names, I couldn't get 12k out of my head. I was looking for a name that was abstract and technical-sounding, yet at the same time mysterious and would make people wonder what it was about. It was also very important that it had to be easy to say, look good on paper, and be able to be understood and pronounced by virtually anyone in the world, no matter which language they speak. 12k fit all of those requirements. [1]
12k publishes what Deupree refers to as minimalist electronic and acoustic ambient music, which often features a fragile blend of synthetic sounds, tape machines and a range of acoustic instrumentation.
Early productions by 12k were limited to between 500 and 1,000 units, partially because of limited storage space, and also because the small edition size increased the collectability of the albums. Since around 2001, editions became less limited but still started at between 1,000 and 2,000 copies.
Deupree has stated that he will be focusing on releasing solo music under his own name for the foreseeable future. He has done collaborations with several different experimental artists.
In 2022, Deupree acted as mastering engineer for Alanis Morissette's ambient album The Storm Before the Calm .
Ryuichi Sakamoto was a Japanese composer, pianist, record producer, and actor who pursued a diverse range of styles as a solo artist and as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO). With his bandmates Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, Sakamoto influenced and pioneered a number of electronic music genres.
Ambient music is a genre of music that emphasizes tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm. It may lack net composition, beat, or structured melody. It uses textural layers of sound that can reward both passive and active listening and encourage a sense of calm or contemplation. The genre is said to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual", or "unobtrusive" quality. Nature soundscapes may be included, and the sounds of acoustic instruments such as the piano, strings and flute may be emulated through a synthesizer.
Electronica is both a broad group of electronic-based music styles intended for listening rather than strictly for dancing and a music scene that came to prominence in the early 1990s in the United Kingdom. In the United States, the term is mostly used to refer to electronic music generally.
Yellow Magic Orchestra was a Japanese electronic music band formed in Tokyo in 1978 by Haruomi Hosono, Yukihiro Takahashi and Ryuichi Sakamoto. The group is considered influential and innovative in the field of popular electronic music. They were pioneers in their use of synthesizers, samplers, sequencers, drum machines, computers, and digital recording technology, and effectively anticipated the "electropop boom" of the 1980s. They are credited with playing a key role in the development of several electronic genres, including synthpop, J-pop, electro, and techno, while exploring subversive sociopolitical themes throughout their career.
Uwe H. Schmidt, also known as Atom™, Atom Heart, or Señor Coconut, is a German composer, musician and producer of electronic music. He is often regarded as the father of electrolatino, electrogospel, and aciton music. In the nineties, Schmidt moved to Chile and developed part of his career there, adopting the alias Señor Coconut.
async is the nineteenth solo studio album of Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto and his first one in eight years since Out of Noise (2009). It is also his first full-length solo record since recovering from throat cancer in 2015. Consisting of a combination of bizarre interpretations of familiar musical instruments, unusual textures both acoustic and electronically-made, samples of recordings of people such as David Sylvian and Paul Bowles doing readings, and everyday sounds borrowed from field recordings of city streets, async has underlying themes of the worries of the end of life and the interaction of differing viewpoints in humanity.
Haruomi Hosono, sometimes credited as Harry Hosono, is a Japanese musician, singer, songwriter and record producer. He is considered to be one of the most influential musicians in Japanese pop music history, credited with shaping the sound of Japanese pop for decades as well as pop music outside of Japan. He also inspired genres such as city pop and Shibuya-kei, and as leader of Yellow Magic Orchestra, contributed to the development and pioneering of numerous electronic genres.
The Roland MC-8 MicroComposer by the Roland Corporation was introduced in early 1977 at a list price of US$4,795. It was one of the earliest stand-alone microprocessor-driven CV/Gate music sequencers, following EMS Sequencer 256 in 1971 and New England Digital's ABLE computer (microprocessor) in 1975. Roland called the MC-8 a "computer music composer" and it was considered revolutionary at the time, introducing features such as a keypad to enter note information and 16 kilobytes of random access memory which allowed a maximum sequence length of 5200 notes, a huge step forward from the 8-16 step sequencers at the time. It also allowed the user to allocate multiple pitch CVs to a single Gate channel, creating polyphonic parts within the overall sequence. Due to the high price, only 200 units were sold worldwide, but it represented a huge leap forward in music technology.
×∞Multiplies is a mini-album and the third studio album by Yellow Magic Orchestra released in 1980. It contains a mixture of songs and instrumentals by YMO, interspersed with comedy sketches. These sketches are performed by Snakeman Show in both Japanese and English, with YMO participating in some of them.
Christopher Willits is a San Francisco-based guitarist, electronic music composer and producer, visual artist and scholar. His music is electroacoustic in nature, in that both analogue and digital sounds are meshed into one singular sound.
Seti is an ambient electronic band, which is a collaboration of Savvas Ysatis and Taylor Deupree. The duo formed in 1993 in New York City.
Savvas Ysatis is a Greek electronic musician.
Stephan Mathieu is a German mastering engineer and former musician. He currently lives in Bonn, Germany where he runs Schwebung Mastering, an independent studio for audio mastering and restoration.
12k is an American independent record label, based in Pound Ridge, New York, United States. It was founded on January 1, 1997, by Taylor Deupree. The label focuses on experimental electronic music, specifically on digital minimalism and contemporary forms; as of 2021, it has released over 100 albums and become one of "the most consistent, and consistently excellent, record companies in the electronic music world." Notable artists appearing in the label's catalogue include Alva Noto and Frank Bretschneider.
Richard Chartier is a sound/installation artist and graphic designer from the United States. He works in reductionist microsound electronic music, a form of extreme minimalism characterised by quiet and sparse sound.
Nicola Corinne Hitchcock is a British singer and songwriter. She is best known for having been one half of the trip hop duo Mandalay. Following the demise of Mandalay, she has worked with various dance music and avant-garde musicians including Chris Brann and Ryuichi Sakamoto but has more recently returned to her solo career.
This is a discography for electronic and experimental hip hop musician DJ Spooky. It lists studio albums, singles, EPs, collaborations, sideman appearances and albums released under his given name Paul D. Miller.
Prototype 909 was an American electronic band which was composed of Taylor Deupree, Dietrich Schoenemann and Jason "BPMF" Szostek which was formed in 1993 in New York, NY.
Reassemblage is the second studio album of Portland, Oregon duo Visible Cloaks, consisting of musicians Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile. The record is named after Trinh T. Minh-ha's 1982 documentary film of the same name, since both works observe its subject matter without showing meaning to it. Reassemblage departs from Doran's past hip-hop releases for a more high-quality style inspired by the works of Japanese synthesizer music acts such as Yellow Magic Orchestra and Ryuichi Sakamoto, all of which were featured on Doran's 2010 mix Fairlights, Mallets & Bamboo.
"Glass" is an improvisational piece composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Carsten Nicolai, known by his stage name as Alva Noto, for Yayoi Kusama's installation Dots Obsession—Alive, Seeking for Eternal Hope, which ran in September 2016 at Philip Johnson's Glass House. A film of the performance was uploaded to the Glass House's official Vimeo account and website on November 11, 2016, and an audio recording of the 37-minute composition was released as an album on Nicolai's label NOTON on February 16, 2018. "Glass" is an unconventional ambient piece that uses sounds from a keyboard, glass-made singing bowls, and digital processing of the House's glass walls. The composition consists of developing layers of sounds performed over a single drone. It was praised by many professional reviewers as a display of Sakamoto and Nicolai's growing artistry.
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