The album “Balance” by Frank Bretschneider & Taylor Deupree was originally released in 2002 by
Mille Plateaux on CD only. The 9 tracks are a perfect example for the aesthetics to arise within the Click & Cuts scene and (ambient-)glitch music movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The two masters of microscopic sounds and sine wave/white noise-based music constructed these seamlessly mixed pieces around rhythms and melodies, which grants the album plenty of dynamics. The wide variety of carefully chosen ambient sounds throughout the whole work endows “Balance” warmth and intimacy.
The recordings are now available for the first time on vinyl within the KeplarRev series, presented in a new updated artwork based on the original layout with photographs by Taylor Deupree.
Frank Bretschneider (born 1956 in Obercrinitz, East-Germany) is a musician, composer and video artist in Berlin. His work is known for precise sound placement, complex, interwoven rhythm structures and its minimal, flowing approach. Bretschneider's subtle and detailed music is echoed by his visuals: perfect translated realizations of the qualities found in music within visual phenomena.
In 1995, Bretschneider and fellow AG Geige member Olaf Bender founded the Rastermusic record label which eventually merged with
Carsten Nicolai's noton to form raster-noton in 1999.
Bretschneider has released his work (in addition to raster-noton) on various labels including 12k, Line,
Mille Plateaux, Shitkatapult, or Longform Editions.
See also
Beispiel (Frank Bretschneider &
Jan Jelinek).
Taylor Deupree (born 1971, lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) is a sound artist, mastering engineer, graphic designer, and photographer. His 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,
Stephan Mathieu,
Stephen Vitiello,
Alva Noto, Christopher Willits, Kenneth Kirschner,
Frank Bretschneider,
Richard Chartier, Savvas Ysatis, Tetsu Inoue, Marcus Fischer and others.
Deupree dedicates as much time to other people's music as he does to his own. In 1997 he founded the record label 12k, which since then has released over 100 recordings by some of the most accomplished musicians and modern sound artists of our time. Many share with Deupree an interest in stark minimalism, but the label has also found room for, located a common ground with, the acoustic avant-garde, the instrumental derivations of post-rock, and the synthetic extremes of techno.
