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"Shoals is perhaps Deupree's most specific album in material concept and sound. In late 2009, he was invited to an artist residency program at the University of York (UK) Music Research Center. He was given the freedom to create a project with the resources of the University and staff at his disposal. The idea was to find a unique idea that he would be unable to realize in his own studio -- and this was when he discovered the University's extensive collection of Javanese and Balinese gamelan instruments. Without hesitation, the groundwork was established for his project at the residency: he would create an album using only these instruments by developing a simple yet powerful audio looping program in the Kyma programming language to capture it all and provide the structure for the finished pieces. After the first day in the studio, Deupree quickly realized that he was less interested in the traditional ways these instruments were played and more fascinated by the sounds of the surfaces of the instruments. And so he began to utilize their edges and undersides and find their flaws, such as broken strings. These instruments, played by scraping, tapping, or with an eBow, became the basis for long and meditative looping beds of sound. In addition, the microphones in the studio would by accident occasionally pick up the sounds of Deupree moving around, brushing the edge of an instrument or setting down mallets. These incidental sounds became as important as the instruments themselves and lend an incredibly physical element to the recordings. Much of Shoals is the sound of microphones in a room as Deupree loops and composes live. The software Deupree developed in Kyma allowed him to very simply layer loops and change pitches of his sounds, often transposing them down 2 or 3 octaves to further emphasize the cracks and fragments. After recording many hours of densely layered loops during the residency, Deupree returned to his 12k studio and finessed the works into the 4 tracks on Shoals, each based around one of the loops. The result is an album that has the slow pace of Stil. mixed with the acoustic imperfections of Weather & Worn and the randomness of Occur. Particles of percussive sounds -- bells, wood, mallets -- are caught by the loop and repeated into a hypnotic underbelly that is coated with a loosely strung Celempung droned by an eBow. The unexpected and almost playful sounds of the instruments' natural surfaces and room sounds are in stark contrast to the smooth tonal melodic elements, yet together they create an immersive space that seems to offer a microcosm of exploration."
