Listening Garden is what I want to hear when I die. Deupree and Willits consistently prove themselves masterful in the process of manipulating the guitar sound to a point where its timbre is totally different on the surface, but continues to carry the character of the instrument. Here, Deupree and Willits are deliciously aquatic; the barely present and seemingly precisely engineered progressing from idea to idea are admirably compiled. The diverse range of timbres produced run into each other effortlessly, creating a completely realised sound-world with foreground and background, texturally rich and constantly evolving.

All that said, this release is obviously limited when listening outside of the space that the installation was created for, or experienced in the manner suggested by its construction. As the press release states: “The audio installation was designed to heighten visitor's senses and alter the sonic space as they sat, read, or had quiet conversation amongst the trees.” By its nature, this release does not demand attention and is simply in place as a background, as, in the very sense of the word – “ambience.” When listening in any other context to this, the single, thirty-three and a half minute track that covers the release seems almost pointlessly uneventful and even when I had been attempting to put myself in a space where the music might have been appropriate, the length of the track became taxing on the attention span.

Further, the expectations I came to this release with were astronomical, having been a huge fan of the majority of the back catalogue of both artists. Even when considering the intention of the release, the way these two forces come together result more in one sound dissolving the other, until the identifiable quirks of each are mainly buried, which unfortunately leads to Listening Garden lacking the character that makes the sound of Willits and Deupree respectively so uniquely wonderful.

However, Listening Garden can potentially be a significantly satisfying piece of music if approached in an appropriate fashion. Rather than grabbing the listener, and demanding they be a part of the atmosphere created, Deupree and Willits here are more tentative, which, in this case, may have hampered the ability for a CD release of the installation to be as interesting as may have been suggested on paper. Listening Garden, on the whole, is a worthy experiment and a particularly refreshing listen in the right context.

Deupree and Willits seem to be more concerned with the creation of beautiful timbres rather than the creation of real progression in their ideas. In this way, the result that comes of this particular effort is restricted in the way it can be experienced, but offers up a sophisticated, well compiled piece of music nonetheless

-Marcus Whale