Why repeat a classic? Comparison with the original is likely to cast even an outstanding achievement in a bad light. So thought composer and engineer Joseph Branciforte when Taylor Deupree approached him with the grandly ambitious—or perhaps ill-advised—idea of creating an acoustic version of the 2002 album. Style.. This record was a high mark of the glitch movement, born from the moment in the late 90s when personal computers became home studios. Deupree endlessly looped a handful of electronic samples slightly out of sync, allowing tiny digital artifacts to creep in and out, like a Steve Reich composition on a miniature scale. Style. it's remarkably warm and moving for such decidedly digital music, but impossible to imagine being played by real people. And yet, on October 10, 2021, Deupree emailed Branciforte asking just that: “I'm not sure if you're familiar with the album… it's very very repetitive… and I'd like it all played.. It's not played for bar and has gone into professional gear.” Branciforte reluctantly agreed — on the condition that he could back out if it didn’t work out.
Although it is Deupree's name on the spine Yet, Branciforte is the mastermind behind the scenes. Only after they started did Deupree reveal that he no longer had the mix files Style.. Branciforte would have to rely on the final recording itself for his transcriptions, a daunting task that required painstakingly isolating different frequency ranges for each track. Branciforte then enlisted an ensemble of expert instrumentalists to pull off his demanding scores, including Madison Greenstone, whose extensive clarinet techniques are largely responsible for the album's tonal character, and Ben Monder, a guitarist whose initial response to the proposal was simple: “That's a terrible idea.”
Let's stop these doubts and doubts. Yet projects. The track that convinced Branciforte to continue was “Temper”. Style.The third track is busy, spinning, IDM inspired. He set about transcribing it for clarinet, dividing it into 16 layers and meticulously notating each one (an example of his extraordinary precision: Layer 11, titled “beep,” has a tempo of 56.48 bpm, a level of specificity that is probably not noticeable by the human ear and certainly cannot be played with any degree of accuracy). Greenstone reproduced the song's static and jittery clicks with a range of techniques. For one layer, he used the clarinet keys to create pounding bass, and for the other he continuously pushed water through the mouthpiece to simulate the track's crashing undercurrent. The results were revealing: This was “Temper,” but it was also something else, a modern classical composition of stunning beauty.
