A beautiful reflective album built around the piano as a central element and inspired by the sound of whispering.
Taylor Deupree describes the album title “as if there's always something about my music that's like a murmur”, resulting in a murmuring effect when pronouncing the names of each track. Mur is a personal journey through the challenging year that 2020 has been. The fifth and last track on the album, Mar, contributes as a catharsis to this turbulent period in Deupree's personal life, which is defined by the interaction between the loud sounds and the soft keys of the piano. As if the storm has died down and the waters have found their peace.
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.
