Price: £12.99
Format: CD/DVD
Artist: Stephen W Tayler
CatNo: BSHED2103
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Stephen W Tayler Da Capo CD_DVD
An ambitious instrumental suite, Da Capo is a rare and beautiful solo release from renowned mixer and producer Stephen W Tayler (who has worked with Kate Bush, Rupert Hine, Underworld, Peter Gabriel, VdGG, Be Bop Deluxe, Rush and many others). 
 
The evocative and pulsating work was conceived as an audio visual experience, and includes a CD of stereo mixes as well as a DVD of film-poems (featuring the album’s music in 5.1 surround, authored by Ray Shulman) and a live performance by Stephen from the Big Room at Real World Studios.
 
CD/DVD in digipak with layout by Carl Glover.
 
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Da Capo. Al Fine. From the beginning to the end.
 
“Da Capo is all about time. It represents times in my life when I’ve felt at a crossroads, and the emotions and memories associated with those times. It is a suite of compositions intended to take the listener on a journey through time.
 
“Certain moments in my life that have left me with longstanding feelings. For instance, Sunday 5.44pm represents a lifelong feeling of melancholy that I have experienced on Sunday afternoons. It started in my childhood with feelings of returning to boarding school. It also combines the feeling of being alone in a foreign city, listening to the sound of the environment. It starts off with feeling that in my childhood and that same sense of melancholy sitting on my balcony of a New York hotel forty or fifty years later, with time slipping by.
 
“I was working on the track ‘Al Fine’ for the closing credits for the visuals when I lost my friend Rupert Hine. So there’s an arc to the story, in this deeply personal album. 
 
“‘Time Stood Still’ represents a moment when i was standing in Joshua Tree at dawn. It really felt like time had frozen, producing a sense of vast timelessness, quiet and isolation.
 
“So a lot of the music stems from a meditative state that I often feel in quite varied environments, a personal testament to the passing of time and the meaning of the infinite moments that comprise the passage of a life.
 
“The repetitive nature of this music is associated with the way that memories change and evolve throughout your life. 
 
“My own work serves as a complement to the work I do on other projects. When I’m working on other people’s music, I often work on repetitive sections to develop them. This produces a meditative state in me and I’ve tried to communicate some of what I experience in my own practice working on other people’s music through my own compositions.
 
“My own compositions express all my favourite things: music, sound itself, dynamics, building sonic images. All those wonderful things that make life worth living.
 
“The DVD is more akin to a visual tone poem, which was conceived as an audio visual surround experience. Da Capo also includes a CD for audio only in stereo which has been optimised for headphones and earbuds. So people can enjoy the work in a multitude of configurations.
 
“When I was a boy chorister my solo was captured on the Benjamin Britten ‘Hymn to St Peter’ and I’ve included this in the composition ‘Verum Mundi’.
 
“Sound as an instrument in itself is kind of what holds it all together. I hear music in everything from nature to street noise to the weather, to the ambience of buildings and enclosed spaces, and that for me produces the sense of time and timelessness that I’m communicating here.”
 
SWT, June 8th 2021
CD
 
1 Da Capo
2 Sunday 5:44pm
3 Crosstalk on the Crosswalk
4 Deutsch’s Prescription
5 Time Stood Still
6 Water Under The Bridge
7 The Forgetting Curve
8 Four Ways to Fiveways
9 Verum Mundi (revisited)
10 Coda Capo
11 Al Fine
 
DVD
 
5.1 with visuals
 
1 Da Capo
2 Sunday 5:44pm
3 Crosstalk on the Crosswalk
4 Deutsch’s Prescription
5 Time Stood Still
6 Water Under The Bridge
7 The Forgetting Curve
8 Four Ways to Fiveways
9 Verum Mundi (revisited)
10 Coda Capo
11 Al Fine
 
Live performance from The Big Room, Real World Studios.