Joseph Branciforte & Jozef Dumoulin: The Rhodes as a Process

Some instruments are defined by their history. Others are defined by the process applied to them. The work of Joseph Branciforte and Jozef Dumoulin exists where those definitions blur, treating the Fender Rhodes electric piano not as a nostalgic artifact but as raw material for electronic exploration.

Branciforte, a New York-based producer and the founder of the greyfade label, operates in the realm of process-based composition. Dumoulin, a Belgian musician, has spent years systematically reimagining the sonic possibilities of the Rhodes through effects and manipulation. Their paths crossed at a festival in Antwerp in 2014, sparking a slow-burning collaboration built on shared methodology rather than immediate output.

The result of that extended dialogue is ‘ITERAE’. The album is less a collection of songs and more a documented experiment, a series of environments where the character of the Rhodes is continuously reshaped. The source sound is familiar, warm and bell-like, but it is subjected to granular synthesis, deep filtering, and spatial processing until it becomes something else entirely. It becomes texture, atmosphere, and a sustained, shimmering tone.

This is not free improvisation in a traditional sense. It is a considered, almost architectural approach to sound. Branciforte’s studio practice provides a framework, a set of electronic conditions, within which Dumoulin’s instrumental responses are captured and further transformed. The music feels both organic and meticulously constructed, a living system contained within precise parameters.

‘ITERAE’ stands as a testament to a particular kind of artistic patience. It captures a decade-long conversation between two specific minds, one focused on the instrument’s potential, the other on the system around it. Together, they bypass genre to focus on pure sonic phenomenon, proving that an instrument’s future is written not in its past, but in the processes yet to be applied.