Saddleback

Music:

Member Since: 7/10/2006
Band Website: www.heavy.net.au
Band Members: Saddleback is primarily the work of Tony Dupé, who plays piano, pump organ, guitar, drums and clarinets, and constructs loops from small musical sounds.On record, he has been joined by Peter Hollo on 'cello, Penny McBride on trumpet, and Robin Dixon on strohviol and singing saw.
Sounds Like: Reviews for "Night Maps":

****A head-long slip into a shadow-streaked forest, where the air is edged with both dreamy curiosity and unnerving questions...undoubtedly cinematic...with dark satiny piano, film-noir trumpets, haunting strings and flourishes of bowed saw and banjo...this mostly feels like just-mapped territory...geography to get lost in.
Lee Tran Lam, Rolling Stone Australia:

Night Maps can't be easily categorised...flows freely between the atmospheric slow jazz of the Necks and David Sylvian's Eastern-flavoured musical shadows...The tracks are all instrumental and built on analog instruments rather than electronic constructions. More importantly, they are all textural, not intellectual. You feel this album, not just hear it.
Bernard Zuel, Sydney Morning Herald:

The sounds drag you down to Saddleback time: the slowness of country life, the shifts in light, the paucity of contact. It’s obviously the same musical mind at play. But there’s a difference too, a loosening. The debut sounded carefully arranged, each sound placed for maximum effect, composed. It was an unfolding palette, rather than a musical thrill. The follow-up is less explicitly restrained. I get the impression Dupé’s production and, more to the point, musical abilities have grown. The music feels freer. These gentle and sad pieces of music take the sonic opportunities of experimental sound design, production and composition, and use them to create music that’s emotional, lovely and bleak. Highly recommended.
Matthew Levinson, Cyclic Defrost:

Slow contemplative stuff that’s so well-paced and intricate that it just has to be the work of a perfectionist...it veers towards ambient territories, textural and dense – there are just so many instruments weaving in and out. Sure there are elements of collage, but Dupé’s cutting and pasting a whole new range of stuff and using a few guests here and there, it’s all his; uniquely and earnestly laid out. It’s hugely organic, too, never clinical. Night Maps is an extremely apt title for the way this record sounds: it’s indelibly mapped out, never with contrivance or trace evidence of just how all the elements fit together so seamlessly.
Richard MacFarlane, Mess & Noise:

(8.5/10) A collection of meticulously arranged sonic essays that sound like nothing else, yet openly and intimately communicate emotionally with a listener. The music unfolds like a story, snippets of piano, clarinets, violin, cello, drums, double bass and guitar taking the role of characters, weaving through and around each other in an interactive dialogue…The arrangement of the various instruments employed…conveys a distinct sense of place, carrying an individuality and character that is so often lost in impersonal, perfectionist, digital recording… Lovingly recorded snippets of seemingly independent instrumental noodlings operating in their own space are brought together like pieces into a jigsaw puzzle, a mountain of meaningless syllables arranged into musical syntax… Night Maps is a series of sophisticated and even cheeky arrangements of a huge volume of source sounds, Dupe exploiting their imperfections and character, as well as bringing them into an intricate form and structure. Night Maps is musical alchemy. Tiny sounds, instrumental soliloquies, loving fractions of music brought together into flawless harmony; a result greater than its parts.
Marcus Whale, The Silent Ballet:

Reviews for "Everything's A Love Letter":

**** If you make music this beautiful- not always straightforwardly pretty, but always rich and evocative and sensual then yes , everything is a love letter, one you'll want to read and re-read whenever you need solace or light. Tony Dup&eacute's side project when he isnt running a label or producing, isn't electronic or post rock or ambient. It isn't song based necessarily, although many tracks stand alone as neat constructions. It's just gorgeous sounds in gentle surroundings with room for your imagination to roam.
Sublime.
Bernard Zuel Sydney Morning Herald:

****1/2 Feature Album
Drawing from a broad palette of jazz, folk and pop influences, Saddlebacks Tony Dupé has crafted an atmospheric and sublime landscape without the excesses and insincerity of voice. Very much the soundtrack to watch glaciers melt, Everything's a love letter delicately shifts between the urban tinged sounds of mechanisation to the organic noises of mountaintop percussion.
Mixing bare to the bone rhythms with scatterings of electronic and instrumental samplings, Dupé has sculpted a world thats immediately engaging, enchanting and entirely believable.an instrumental album of clarity and nocturnal warmth, Everything's a Love Letter says in sounds what we are all trying to (but can not) say in words
Robert Lukins Time Off Brisbane:

The debut album for Sydney based artist Tony Dupe (aka Saddleback) is the kind of pure almost ethereal type of music that feels like it floats into your ear space and gently reverberates around the room. There is an inherent stillness and beauty in the sounds, in the delicately shifting layers, in the mesmerising repetition that gradually builds in density and floats away. Genre wise it's difficult to define exactly whats happening, with the predominantly analogue instruments owing a huge debt to ambient electronica. At times it feels like an ambient Aphex Twin: in conversation with the Necks : during their quieter soundtrack moments, whilst at others it's difficult to draw any parallels. Regardless this is an album that utilises elements of space, pop, ambient, folk, electronica, jazz, even classical, all seamlessly and subtly integrated into Saddleback's amazingly lush sound.
Bob Baker Fish Inpress Melbourne:

Saddleback's nexus Tony Dupe focuses almost completely on the most palatable textures and sonic shifts, creating a disc that sounds ultra-modern and urban, like the muffled clangor of a city street. It's very reminiscent of Germany's great Kammerflimmer Kollektief, with less dalliance with electronic underpinnings.
On most of the tracks that make up this album, the unifying themes are sparseness and reliance on melody and strongly rooted rhythm. The most remarkable aspect of Everything's a Love Letter is how the rhythm acts as a street car to link the different sounds of the soundscape (the brass section, the string section, etc.).
Aaron Shaul Ink 19 website:

Dupé has allowed his own wondrous melodic sensibilities to come to the fore, taking on free-form jazz, folk, pop and ambience through the Saddleback moniker. Everything's a Love Letter is a record filled with meticulously layered sonics and truly palatable abstraction. Rippling with moments of tenderness and desolation, Dupé takes on themes of place and its emotive bearing.
Dan Rule Spinach 7 Website

: The combination of strings, brass, keys and percussion on this album fuse together to form beautiful instrumental pieces. Saddleback's music is the perfect accompaniment to thinking.
Soapbox Notes:

Record Label: preservation
Type of Label: Indie