Taylor Deupree

“Winter hasn’t completely loosened its grip here, but the light has changed and the sun rises just slightly higher in the sky each morning. While I will miss the snow-quieted atmosphere, brought about by the beautiful, monochromatic landscape, part of me, especially now, longs for change. Visible, forward-moving change.

Within my small sonic world I’ve urged things along, creating a time I look forward to, a few months from now, when things will be different.

Chorus (Dusk/Dawn) is a continuation of the idea I put forth in Snow (Dusk/Dawn) (2010) that found me responding, musically, to my immediate natural surroundings. But here, on Chorus, I have manufactured this landscape. Created and imagined one with highly non-organic means, rushing the change of seasons and, despite going against the core foundation of so much of my work, looking to speed up time rather than stop it.”

Taylor Deupree, March 4, 2021

In Chorus (Dusk/Dawn) Deupree utilizes a single eurorack synthesizer oscillator to create the sound of the dawn chorus that surrounds him in the summer months at his studio in New York. This din of insects (mostly crickets, katydids and cicadas) is both calming and relentless, at times reaching a deafening state as it overtakes the sonic landscape each morning and evening. The purely synthetic source of Deupree’s creation highlights the urge to imagine and manufacture this natural phenomenon, during a season in which it has not yet arrived. Musical layers interweave and accompany the “insects” in the form of lilting, generative sine waves, a sonically pure tone intending to mesh with, rather than contrast, this imagined dawn.