“If you like minimalism with a post-pop/Bang on a Can bent, you’ll love Sun, Will Grow by American composer (and filmmaker) Taylor Joshua Rankin…” - PAN M 360 (Les Meilleures Musiques De Partout)

“The movements present beautifully wrought alternating panoramas of tone and periodicity that hypnotize but do not get into an overly formulaic mantra like classic Minimalism sometimes does.” - Classical-Modern Music Review

“Taylor Joshua Rankin's album Sun, Will Grow is an expressive journey through memory and art... a moving work that celebrates both the past and the future, taking the listener on an intimate, personal journey.” (7/10) - AM:plified (Das Magazin für starke Musik)

“The album is tinged with all of the wistfulness one can imagine…” - A Closer Listen

“[Sun, Will Grow] hints at themes of memory and nostalgia, and the joys and pains associated as life’s new chapters unfold…” - Unfinished Side

“Every music lover who appreciates modern music with an artsy and chamber pop edge should pay attention to this album and this composer.” - PAN M 360 (Les Meilleures Musiques De Partout)

Los Angeles-based composer and filmmaker Taylor Joshua Rankin releases his second album, Sun, Will Grow, on July 7. The album, recorded at the illustrious Tiny Telephone in Oakland, hints at themes of memory and nostalgia, and the joys and pains associated as life’s new chapters unfold.

A wholly personal expression, the music on Sun, will Grow is of varied instrumentation and was written during the summer of 2021. The eight tracks of minimalist-leaning, instrumental music was written specifically for the album, and asks the big questions – scrutinizing the concepts of choice and existence, and the personal nature of inward reflection as a means toward fulfilling artistic creation.

Sun, Will Grow is, in essence, a coming-of-age album. The music is meant to evoke the murkiness of memories and ethereal nature of the past, from childhood to adulthood, while looking toward the future. Born and raised in the Bay Area, Taylor utilizes field recordings captured over the years in San Francisco, the East Bay, and the Peninsula. The stunning artwork by Najeebah Al-Ghadban synthesizes black and white photography of the past with living flowers and plants picked from around San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The photo taken of Taylor’s hand was also captured in Golden Gate Park. In this way the black and white photos take on the meaning of old memories and the flowers as a possibility to begin anew.

Sun, Will Grow was the final large-scale musical creative project that Taylor embarked on in the Bay Area with entirely local collaborators, before moving away. In that way it is sort of an amalgamation of all his love, his memories, inspirations – a synthesis of overcoming familial trauma and the hereditary nature of emotional and psychological disease, losses, his entire life up to this point, of a chapter now closing.

At a time when Taylor had found himself in a personal compositional rut, an exploration of new forms of linear contrapuntal writing and micro-polyphonic harmony emerged out of creative experimentation and helped free Taylor from this rut, steering his compositional language into a new direction. The album is written mostly around this new style, especially in the more dense string-based tracks such as “The Snow Leopard” and “A Cloud Stands Geometric.”

As a further means of making an album that felt like a wholly personal expression, each track title refers to a film that is a deep love and inspiration of Taylor’s from some of his most favorite filmmakers, such as Tsai Ming-liang, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Federico Fellini.

The music on this album was written deliberately as a structural framework for further exploration and tinkering within the recording studio. In this way the studio and the production is as central and important as the compositional material, and results in a hybridization of sound and noise with instruments both acoustic and electronic.

Artist Statement:

Making this album has been the most creatively liberating project of my lifetime. Early on in the process I had this idea to make an album that was part contemporary classical, part ambient, part experimental, part electronic, and record it like a contemporary record but still have it feel like it existed in the world of new-music. When my producer Beau and I first got coffee to talk about the record I shared with him all these influences that I had been drawing on in the writing process and that I wanted to further draw on in the recording process, like Bjork, r beny, Ana Roxanne, John Tavener, Max Richter, Holly Herndon, Nico Muhly, Missy Mazzoli, Jonny Greenwood, Ellen Arkbro, Chihei Hatakeyama, Valgeir Sigurðsson, and lots more. I knew I wanted to work with Beau on this because I was familiar with his excellent producing work at Tiny Telephone and had been made aware of his extensive knowledge and skills in electronic manipulation and processing. We discussed how to bring in these ambient, processed, electronic worlds into the music, and it was clear that he’d be the perfect collaborator.

So that was the process in my head going forward which was that I’d write each of these pieces on the album, as these acoustic-instrumental foundations, bring them into Ableton and write some synth related material to grow the sound world a bit, and then work with Beau to implement these electronics and processing in the studio as extensions of that sound. Part of why I love working with Beau is I can poorly describe the kind of the sound I’m looking for and he’ll plug a couple things in and then we’re on track to getting that sound. We had such a good rapport on the record that in a couple of the tracks I just described the electronic elements I was thinking of and let him go off and craft that sound and electronic-compositional performance himself. So the album really is a true collaboration between us, the musicians, and Najeebah who created all the album art.

I first found Najeebah’s work on instagram and fell in love with it. She’s had a bunch of work featured in the New York Times so I assumed she was based in the East Coast, but when I first reached out to her she had just relocated to San Francisco. Her work is so incredible and inspiring because it’s basically collage-work, where she pulls from multiple concentrations in the art world and she laces them together in such a provocative way. Many of her works include live elements too incorporated into the art, like the flowers in this album. It’s very dramatic and I responded to it immediately as I knew the album we were making was going to be quite dramatic. I also love her work because I feel there’s a real similarity between the process of collage and my own compositional process, and I wanted that connection to be shown.

Najeebah was an incredible collaborator on this album. She would be sending me all these different amazing ideas and it would be so hard to choose which direction to go because each example was so incredible, but once we started honing in on a concept things really just exploded and grew from there. She ended up creating a full 12 page digital booklet for the album with an original piece of art for each track. Her world is really the visual landscape of this music. I’m so proud of the work she’s done on this thing and I hope more people check her out.

Sun, Will Grow is roughly 3 years in the making, and between the musicians, the studios, the artists, and the engineers, this has been the creative project of a lifetime, and a dream come true. I am very proud of this album and so thankful for all the artists that have left their indelible stamp on it.

-TJR