Canadian sound artist Mark Templeton utilizes acoustic instruments, found sounds and sampled material to construct textured, collage-like electronic compositions. Since the release of his critically acclaimed
Stars of the Lid are a band specializing in drone-based ambient music. They list among their influences minimalist and electronic composers such as Arvo Pärt, Zbigniew Preisner, Gavin Bryars, and Henryk Górecki, as well as Talk Talk (both bands have tracks named "Taphead"), post-rock artists Labradford, and ambient innovator Brian Eno. Their music largely consists of beatless soundscapes, composed of droning, effects-treated guitars along with piano, strings, and horns; volume swells and feedback fill the gap of rhythmic instruments, providing dynamic movement within the songs.
Jan Jelinek (whose monikers include Gramm, for Source Records, and Farben), is a Berlin-based producer of electronic music drawing influences from jazz, dub, funk, soul, and house. Prior to releasing on the ~Scape label under his own name, he had put out albums as Farben (for Klang Elektronik). On 2001's Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records, Jelinek manipulates fragments of sound from old jazz recordings, transforming them beyond recognition into completely new pieces of music. On la nouvelle pauvrete, he joins forces with the imaginary band The Exposures, which he himself fabricated.
Marsen Jules is one of the aliases for the musical output of Martin Juhls from Dortmund/Germany. As Marsen Jules he concerns himself with compression of atmosphere and emotion in the most abstract sense, based on carefully selected sound fragments and quotations. Maybe one could think of ordinary sampling, but Marsen Jules processes another step further. Neither the sampled sound nor the Instrument itself is centered in his work, actually its the particular moment, where the authenticity...
Andrew Pekler was born in Samarkand, Uzbekistan (then U.S.S.R.). His family immigrated to the U.S., eventually settling in Monterey, California. In the mid 90s he moved to Heidelberg, Germany to attend university. Since 2000 he has been living and working in Berlin.
Under his own name he has produced two records for the ̃scape label, Station to Station (2002) and Nocturnes, False Dawns and Breakdowns (2004) as well as releasing Strings + Feedback (2005) on Staubgold. His latest album Cue, was released in June 2007 on Kranky (Chicago, USA).
There are two different artists under the name Minamo: An electro-acoustic rock group and a Free Jazz/Classical Duo. 1. In 1999, the electro-acoustic group Minamo was formed by Keiichi Sugimoto and Tetsuro Yasunaga. In 2000, minamo's self-released CD-R "wakka" was reissued by the New York label Quakebasket. This release was selected by Matmos as one of best sounds in 2001 in The Wire magazine.
In 2001 two new members joined, Yuiichiro Iwashita (guitar) and Namiko Sasamoto (sax, organ), to make the band a quartet. In 2002, first CD album ".kgs" has released by the Tokyo label 360 records.
Deaf Center are collaborators Erik Skodvin (AKA Svarte Greiner, Xhale, Solitaire Albread) and Otto Totland (AKA Supine, Nest), operating out of Norway since 2003. Old classmates, they finally decided to write music together and ended up creating the Neon City EP, soon followed by the full length album, Pale Ravine. http://www.deafcenter.net
http://myspace.com/deafcenter
There are 2 bands with the name Aus: 1) Born in 1983, Aus is the talented Yasuhiko Fukuzono from Tokyo, Japan. Yasuhiko Fukuzono is an experimental video score, ambient breaks and sound artist from Tokyo, Japan. His third LP, "Sonorapid", mixes floating ambient electronics and gentle female vocals with glitch rhythms. He started his journey in the world of music at the age of 4, when his family sent him to attend piano classes.
Technology and imperfection. The raw and the processed. Curator and curated. Solo explorer and gregarious collaborator. The life and work of Taylor Deupree are less a study in contradictions than a portrait of the multidisciplinary artist in a still-young century. 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).