Joseph Branciforte & Jozef Dumoulin: ITERAE
Greyfade

Josh Mason: Kicking a Dark Horse
Greyfade

Founded by Joseph Branciforte in 2019, Greyfade's a boutique label whose products are as much art objects as musical releases. That they're models of sound design shouldn't surprise either, given his credentials as a composer, designer, sound artist, engineer, and producer. While Greyfade releases are presented in varying physical formats, it would be easy to imagine encountering them in a gallery as installations pairing music and visuals and available for purchase in its gift shop.

ITERAE, Branciforte's collaboration with Paris-based Belgian composer, pianist, and electronic musician Jozef Dumoulin, might remind listeners of a certain age of the clicks'n'cuts-styled music issued by labels such as Raster-Noton, Line, and Mille Plateaux and make them feel like they've been transported back to that adventurous time. Operating out of his Greyfade Studio, located north of NYC, Branciforte proudly continues that tradition with projects that embrace a myriad of experimental approaches.

Prominently featured on ITERAE is Dumoulin's Fender Rhodes, but the album isn't some rapprochement between glitchy electronics and jazz piano. Instead, the recording fuses timbres and textures sourced from electronic technologies and amplified keyboard instruments and shapes them into eight modular settings poised between improvisational abstraction and formal composition. Recorded over two days, the project is a descendant of sorts to Dumoulin's A Fender Rhodes Solo, an intense 2014-released examination of the instrument's sound possibilities. Interestingly, he and Branciforte are both credited with Fender Rhodes on ITERAE, each also credited with electronics and in Branciforte's case live editing.

The physical presentation of the project is striking. One side of a large-format (vinyl sized) white case houses a standard compact disc containing the full sixty-eight minutes of material (a die-cut detail references the long-retired design of the floppy disk, though it could also function as a wall-hanging tab). Housed on the reverse side of the case are four 80mm compact discs with two tracks on each. One can thereby choose to listen to the recording in its entirety or as four separate parts in the order of one's choosing. In the single-disc presentation, the music flows (for the most part) from one track to the next without pause.

Musically, the material sounds pretty much as anticipated, though that it aligns with expectations shouldn't be construed negatively: these eight pieces stimulate the senses and tickle the ears with their ever-evolving tapestries of Rhodes timbres and fluttering textures. The opening piece is representative in its lulling flow of glitchy smears, tears, and ripples. Incessant stabs punctuate the music's dream-like flow, its open-ended development rendered unpredictable when Branciforte shapes and processes it in real time. In the second track, glitches of static and noise merge with wavering tones and bass throbs in a manner reminiscent of the material Frank Bretschneider and Carsten Nicolai issued in the early 2000s. Whereas the third burbles for eleven minutes like some endlessly percolating electronic cauldron, the whirr-and-click of hydraulic pulsations interweaves with gleaming Rhodes patterns in the fifth. Things turn aggressive during the seventh when fuzzy guitar-like figures and industrial belches convulse chaotically across a woozy backdrop. Tension's created throughout when real-time improvisation loosens the reins of formal composition structures, the result an abstract and elusive electroacoustic presentation. Track lengths that in five cases push past nine minutes at a time allow for probing and unhurried exploration by the participants. Gestures emerge that suggest new directions to be explored, and extended durations allow for the pursuit of such organic development to happen.

Greyfade's latest release is the third in its FOLIO series, a format initiated in 2024 that pairs a digital download with an attractively designed hardcover book. Again the release is as much art object as musical and/or literary work and thus allows for a multi-sensory experience of the label's products. Created by Florida-based musician and sound artist Josh Mason, Kicking A Dark Horse is a terrific example of the project concept: the text, displayed in a free verse-like manner and its experimental character similarly free in its stream-of-consciousness-styled form, complements music that's likewise impressionistic. Mason's text, not surprisingly, was written in tandem with and designed to be experienced with the music. Co-produced by him and Branciforte, the nine tracks were mastered by the latter, while the book's cover is credited to Mason and its interior design to Branciforte. Integrating the hybrid project's aspects further, a QR code appears inside the book along with a page showing track titles.

There's a very appealing tactile quality to the book when its linen cover opens to reveal 116 pages of smooth, high-quality stock. The text fragments are presented in a compelling visual display when white space, contrasting text sizes (a smaller column appears to the left of the larger main text), and hand-drawn illustrations appear on its pages. The destabilizing discontinuities of the writing content are mirrored in music that's equally enigmatic. Order and structure sit uneasily alongside irresolution and instability, tension running through the project in both its music and text.

Mason, who's known for working with modular synthesis, guitar, and electronics, produced the nine tracks with modular synthesizers only. Like the text, the music feels spontaneously birthed, and in fact Mason performed the material live, much as Branciforte edited his own project with Dumoulin live. Mason likened the music on Kicking A Dark Horse to "spinning plates,” and the simile's apt in acknowledging the music's in-the-moment definition. And in keeping with Mason's image-evoking track titles, the music encourages visualizations and associations that are unique to each listener yet rich nonetheless. It's telling that the book's subtitle reads "a nonlinear travelogue of the states of Florida.”

In contrast to its title, “Unincorporated Community Fight Song” burbles placidly in place and generally soothes with a tropical hall-of-mirrors mix of clicks, washes, and tinklings. Fisticuffs between irate neighbours isn't the first thing that comes to mind as its lilting material peacefully advances. “Traumahawk (Volunteer Corps.)” unfolds as smoothly, its glitch-laden textures calling to mind releases from days of yore on Line, 12k, and the Mille Plateaux sub-label Ritornell. In such cases, no one would mistake Mason's material for the noisier kind associated with figures like Merzbow and Peter Rehberg. A spooky, sci-fi quality oozes from “Would Go,” on the other hand, when rattles, flutter, and swirls flood the shimmering terrain. Most of these meditative settings glisten and flicker at a restrained level and, as the concluding reverie “A Garden” proves, not displeasingly so.

July 2026