This week’s post is a little different—it’s actually a podcast.
Back in November 2024, the radio host Gregory Taylor dedicated a full episode of his long-running program RTQE to Greyfade—the record label I started in 2019 to investigate how systems, sound, and release format intersect in physical and digital forms. Over the course of two hours, he offered a thoughtful meditation on the label’s catalog and underlying philosophy: from the details of our digital-to-acoustic translation projects and FOLIO editions to larger ideas about curation, attention, and what it means to present music in physical form today.
Gregory has generously allowed me to share the episode—available to stream at the top of this post—along with a full transcript below.
Recent Patch Notes entries have focused on performance and system design in Max/MSP. Gregory is a himself a longtime Max/MSP user and educator—his book Generating Sound and Organizing Time has been an invaluable reference in my own patching practice. And while Greyfade represents a parallel layer of my work—in the form of publication, distribution, and object design— many of its core ideas can be traced to my engagement with systems design in Max.
Whether you're already familiar with Greyfade or just tuning in, I hope this offers a useful point of entry into the label’s universe and some of the artists and ideas that animate it.
A quick reminder that Founding Members of Patch Notes receive all Greyfade’s releases for that year digitally (with proceeds flowing to the individual artists), as part of their yearly membership—a small thank you for supporting the creation and documentation of new systems, formats, and listening models.
Joseph Branciforte
9 July 2025
The following is an adapted transcript from RTQE, a radio program hosted by Greg Taylor on WORT Madison. The episode aired in November 2024 and was devoted entirely to Greyfade's music and philosophy. Lightly edited for clarity and flow.
Labels that Embody Ideas
Welcome. I'm Greg Taylor, host of RTQE, a Sunday evening radio program focused on electronic, experimental, classical, and improvised sound. Tonight, I’m doing something a little different. I’m going to focus on the work of a single label—something I don’t think I’ve done in over 20 years on this show.
One of the changes I’ve witnessed during that time is the decline of the traditional label. Labels used to serve as centers of social capital, acting as gatekeepers for what you could and couldn’t hear. But as technology has become more democratized—and as the means of making and sharing music have expanded—that model has had to change. Platforms like Bandcamp have enabled independent artists and small communities to promote themselves directly. You might think that would mean everything is now open, unfiltered. But in some important ways, things haven’t changed as much as we’d like to believe.
For one, many current labels operate as small communities of friends who release music for a slightly larger circle of friends. That’s replaced the top-down model with a more lateral, but still familiar, dynamic. Often these circles revolve around what we’d now call microgenres. There’s nothing wrong with that—it's worked beautifully for many people. But there’s something else that interests me even more: labels that don’t just curate music, but embody ideas. Labels that reflect a clear attitude toward work, form, and listening. When you hear something from them, you might not know exactly what it will sound like, but you have a sense of the framework it’s working within.
Tonight, I want to spend some time with one of those labels: Greyfade.
What prompted this was the arrival of two new Greyfade releases—though they didn’t come in the usual form. They came as books, each containing a download code and a recording. In essence, they are albums. I would treat them as such on the air. But they also include essays, interviews with the artists, and notes on structure and process—and in both cases, full scores.
Translations & Transformations
Greyfade is deeply interested in algorithmic composition, generative structures, and the intersection of electronic and acoustic practices. Specifically, what happens when a piece originally conceived as electronic is placed in the hands of live performers.
When electronic music first emerged, part of its appeal was the sense of control: everything could be programmed, shaped, managed—top to bottom. But when you hand a score to a performer, you gain something else: articulation, interpretation, nuance. A musician brings their own sensibility to the work in a way that can’t be coded.
Greyfade seems committed to exploring what that looks like in practice.
We’ll begin with three pieces from two of the label’s recent book-based releases. The first is a collaboration between Kenneth Kirschner and Joseph Branciforte, the founder of Greyfade. The piece, Three Cellos, began its life as a digital composition by Kirschner titled after the date it was started: July 8th, 2017. That algorithmic material was transcribed into a score and given to a single cellist to perform as a multitrack recording. We’ll hear two sections from that piece. The book includes detailed notes on Kirschner’s compositional process, the challenges of realizing the recording, and the score itself.
The second work is from a newer release, Sti.ll, by Taylor Deupree—a name that needs no introduction to listeners familiar with his work on 12k or with Ryuichi Sakamoto. Now imagine taking a signature piece of Deupree’s and subjecting it to the same transformation: transcribing it, giving it to skilled acoustic performers, and allowing it to emerge as something new. That’s what Sti.ll offers.
So, to open tonight’s program, here are three pieces from two recent releases on the Greyfade label.
The Album as Conceptual Object
The pieces of music we’ve just heard were releases as books—books that include, among other things, the scores of the pieces themselves—should you ever decide to play them—but also information about the works. To give you an idea of what the book project entails, this one has an essay by Philip Sherburne, writing on the subject of creating it by Taylor Deupree himself, a number of other writers, the complete score of the work, and digital downloads not only of the album Sti.ll, but also Taylor Deupree's original Stil. release on 12k.
That’s kind of the answer to a question: what does it mean to release something physically? Do you build a deluxe box for it? Do you throw in a postcard from Colorado Springs?
Joseph's thought hard about the idea of what would happen if we created something that concentrated on the person that created the work, the persons that realized the work, the instructions necessary to reproduce the work—to surround the recording itself with information that's actually useful. Information that resembles the answers to questions that, as a listener curious about a piece of music you just hear plucked out of the air or in digital form, you would probably ask yourself.
I think that's a really worthy undertaking. It's what started this program underway.
They are, in a way, central to the label’s raison d’être— that there should be a kind of conceptual universe for a record. Not just a collection, not just “I turned on the tape and this is what happened,” but a synthesis of design, text, and structure. The kind of thing that makes investing your time as a listener worthwhile.
And I would say that this is something Joseph has consistently followed, even when it assumes different forms within the Greyfade label—which is one of the reasons I look forward to the next thing they do.
I have a thing with books I buy in hardback. A lot of what I read is electronic. But if I finish something and think, “I’m going to read this again,” then I buy it in hardback. And after enough of those, there’s a list of authors whose work I always buy in hardback. When a new novel comes out, I don’t wait for the reviews—I just buy it. Well, Greyfade, for me, is one of those labels.
Improvising Structure
Joseph Branciforte is somebody that you've heard on this program before. One of the more regular ways that you've heard him has been a set of duet recordings—there are two of them—with the utterly prosaic titles LP1 and LP2, from Theo Bleckmann on vocals and Joseph Branciforte himself on electronics.
The work has its beginnings back in 2018. The two guys know each other from Joseph engineering and working on recordings by a number of other people you know—for example, Ben Monder.
They got together, did some improvising—that sort of territory where improvisation and composition interact—and by electronic means extended the thing further. They were invited to do a performance with Ryuichi Sakamoto, and some of the music you're going to hear next has its origin in the work they did for that.
LP1 is absolutely magnificent. It straddles genre material, it's very beautiful, the voice is entirely hidden or revealed in some other cases, and it worked so well for them that they got together to work on a second LP.
We're going to continue tonight's program by listening to a pair of pieces from Joseph Branciforte and Theo Bleckmann's collaborations together, from LP1 and LP2, recorded five years apart—LP1 in 2019 and LP2 in 2024.
From The Machine
We started the program with music from Kenneth Kirschner—no mystery to those of you who’ve listened to this show for a long time. And I’m going to play you something now from the first work that Kenneth Kirschner and Joseph Branciforte did together, a recording from 2021 called From the Machine, Vol. 1.
The idea behind it underpins a lot of the work Greyfade does. Computer-based composition opens up all kinds of possibilities—adapting techniques from electronic music, algorithmic processes, indeterminacy, and generative systems.
But what Greyfade has done is explore what happens when the output of those systems is placed in the hands of really good musicians.
When you give a score to a real musician, you’re certainly specifying a lot. In some Chinese traditional music, for example, the specifications for what each hand does are extremely detailed—should your finger be up or down, etc. But interestingly, in some of that music, there's no indication of note duration. Everything is specified—except for time. Part of that is convention. It’s your teacher who teaches you the durations, just like a piano teacher teaches you how to play dynamics and phrasing. It’s embodied learning.
What Kenneth Kirschner and Joseph Branciforte decided to do was use nonlinear software techniques, turn them into musical notation, and then have them performed by acoustic players. Kirschner’s piece on this record began its life completely electronically. It used small piano fragments and string recordings, and modified them through looping, time-stretching, recombination, things like that. He’s known for taking a very small amount of material and doing a great deal with it.
They then took that score material and had Joseph go through it. And believe me, this isn’t easy work—you don’t sit down with a cup of coffee and knock this one out. He scored it, and passed it along to pianist Jade Conlee and cellists Mariel Roberts and Meaghan Burke for acoustic realizations.
Algorithmic Sound Without Instruments
While most of Greyfade’s work—with very few exceptions—involves the use of acoustic instruments, one of those exceptions is a release you’ve certainly heard on this program before.
It’s the work of our old friend Greg Davis, and it’s a kind of recording whose idea is insanely cool, but you can’t really do it in the real world. The album is called New Primes.
What Greg had done was to look at odd-numbered primes as frequency values for sine-tone pieces. Now, if you know anything about the overtone series, you’ll know that odd-numbered partials don’t fall within octaves. The first harmonic is your fundamental, the second is an octave above, the fourth is two octaves, and so on—it’s a doubling of frequency. But odd-numbered harmonics fall in other places, and that’s what gives you those interesting, less consonant intervals.
And of course, what also happens to be odd in its numbering? Primes.
So what Greg did was to begin with sine wave generators—he wrote the patch in MaxMSP—and created a network of pure sine tones. He’d take a prime number and use that as the harmonic factor. Then, to keep everything within the range of human hearing, he transposed the results down into a compact two-, three-, or four-octave window. That’s what generated the pieces.
Obviously, this isn’t something you can really do with acoustic instruments. But the conceptual framework behind it fits really well with what Greyfade explores.
I wanted to include it here to make the point that algorithmic work doesn’t always have to be translated into acoustic performance. Greyfade strikes a really nice balance—continually exploring the conceptual landscape of a release, and the many possible forms it can take.
So here’s a couple of pieces from Greg Davis’s album on Greyfade, New Primes.
What Is a Loop?
The two pieces you just heard—Sophie Germain and Pierpont—required synthetic means to be realized. It would be very difficult to perform them with acoustic instruments.
The piece I'm going to play for you next is the work of Philip Golub, from an album he released on Greyfade in 2023 called Filters. And it’s built around a really interesting idea: What is a loop?
If you're an electronic musician, you might think of a loop as a piece of audio that repeats over and over again. You duplicate loops, layer them against each other, retune them, time-stretch them—and what occurs is a piece.
But there are other ways to think about looping. What Philip Golub has done is to take some compositional perspectives and explore that idea—to make pieces that are looped, but don’t sound like it.
Each piece on the album includes two musical streams or ideas. One of those streams involves a single high note and a single low note on the piano, struck simultaneously. There's a succession of major and minor triads—they’re played with, adjusted—but they cycle through and continually change the color of those high and low notes you hear throughout.
There are some very subtle phrase structures attached to that idea, but that’s essentially what’s happening in the pieces.
It’s a really interesting, and I think very imaginative, recording. It really got me rethinking the idea of what constitutes a loop—and what kinds of nested looping structures are actually possible. Even if you know the idea behind the piece, listening to it reminds me a little bit of, I don’t know... a sped-up Feldman, or maybe Erik Satie. His Gymnopédies seem to share some of that sensibility.
We’re going to listen to Loop 5 from Philip Golub’s album Filters.
Just Intonation & Structural Drift
We're going to end tonight's program with one final release on the Greyfade label. It’s the work of Christopher Otto, a member of the JACK Quartet. Some of you may have had the chance to hear JACK when they performed in Madison. They’re ferocious, brave, and ready for anything.
Growing up in Champaign-Urbana, Christopher encountered the idea of just intonation—no surprise to regular listeners.
The simple way to explain it is this: when you lay out the pitches in an orchestra, you’re usually working with simple whole-number frequency relationships. An octave is a doubling of frequency. A perfect fifth is a 3:2 ratio. If you go all the way up stacking these intervals using pure ratios, when you get back to where an octave should be, you’re not quite there—because equal temperament and just intonation don't align. That tiny discrepancy creates something new.
Christopher Otto, who trained both as a mathematician and a musician, wrote a piece exploring that difference.
It’s written for three string quartets: two pre-recorded, and one live. They all begin on the same pitch. The sequences they play are made of what we think of as simple, consonant intervals—thirds, fifths, fourths, seconds—but in just intonation. Since each sequence builds on another using exact whole-number ratios, they slowly drift apart. The quartets fall out of alignment with each other—not chaotically, but subtly, structurally.
The piece begins deceptively simply and transforms itself into something rich and strange. The piece is called rag’sma, and it’s a Greyfade release.
This has been a different kind of episode—something I don't think I’ve done before: spending a full program thinking through a set of ideas as they express themselves across the catalog of a single label.
We’re used to thinking of labels today as social networks—friends releasing music for other friends. That model works, and it’s part of what makes the musical world such an open and vibrant place.
But every once in a while, it’s worth spending time with a label whose catalog seems to express something larger—something about transitions, about tool use, about listening, about form.
That’s what Greyfade is about.
Gregory Taylor / RTQE
November 2024
Featured Works:
• Kenneth Kirschner: July 8, 2017 – i. (from Three Cellos, 2024)
• Kenneth Kirschner: July 8, 2017 – vi. (from Three Cellos, 2024)
• Taylor Deupree (arr. Joseph Branciforte): Recur (for Guitar, Cello, Double Bass, Flute, Lap Harp, & Percussion) (from Sti.ll, 2024)
• Joseph Branciforte & Theo Bleckmann: 5.5.9 (from LP1, 2019)
• Joseph Branciforte & Theo Bleckmann: 11.15 (from LP2, 2023)
• Kenneth Kirschner: April 20 2015 (from From The Machine: Vol. 1, 2021)
• Greg Davis: Sophie Germain (from New Primes, 2022)
• Greg Davis: Pierpont (from New Primes, 2022)
• Phillip Golub: Loop 5 (from Filters, 2022)
• Christopher Otto & JACK Quartet: rag’sma q1q2q3 (from rag’sma, 2021)
Podcast audio mastered by Takumi Sugai.
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