About "Up Through The Trees"
"Up Through The Trees" came about by mostly unplanned means yet the three of us are happy to be able to join together to help the victims of the earthquake, tsunami and following nuclear disaster this past March in Japan. The song began as a studio improvisation for guitar and analog synthesizer during a rehersal session between myself and sound artist Stephen Vitiello preceding a New York City performance. I had been invited by Ryuichi to take part in Kizunaworld and the timing was right for Ryuichi to collaborate with us on a piece. He used our studio recording from the week before, adding some quiet piano, and uplifted the track into a finished piece. It is a quiet study in stillness and reflection as we, on the other side of the globe, do what we can to help our friends and countless victims in Japan cope with the hardship brought upon them.
- Taylor Deupree
Stephen Vitiello
Stephen Vitiello has created CDs for such labels as New Albion, Sub Rosa and 12k. His sound installations have been presented internationally. Since 1989, Vitiello has collaborated with numerous musicians and visual artists including Nam June Paik, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Roden, Scanner, Lawrence English and Machinefabriek.
Taylor Deupree
Taylor Deupree is an accomplished sound artist whose 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 minimalist 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. In 1997 he founded the record label 12k (http://www.12k.com), which since then has released over 80 recordings by some of the most accomplished musicians and sound artists of our time and has located a common ground with the acoustic avant-garage, the instrumental derivations of post-rock, and the synthetic extremes of techno and ambient musics.
