Keith Fullerton Whitman Returns with 'Generators'

BY Josiah HughesPublished Jan 18, 2012

When he's not hawking the best avant-garde records and cassettes through his Mimaroglu Music Sales site, Keith Fullerton Whitman is an elder of the outsider electronic scene. With that in mind, it's always an event when he releases a new album.

Next month, Whitman will drop a new album called Generators via the Editions Mego imprint. The release stems from a composition called "Generator" that Whitman has performed over the last two and a half years. Here, the final two performances of the work are represented.

For those who want to get really heady, here's a description of the "Generator" composition from the album's press release:

Composed for, and realized with a scalable selection of digital & analogue modular synthesis equipment, "Generator" was at attempt to wrest a viable performance-based music out what had until then been a solitary set of sound-design tools. The piece grew out of a frustration with the limitlessness of computer-based real-time synthesis & algorithmic / generative systems vs. their utter failure as performance solutions. It hinges heavily on the ideology of the "Playthroughs" system (in that the subtle tuning inconsistencies of a physical instrument -- the electric guitar -- could be amplified & multiplied) through the use of multiple layerings of different topologies of oscillator, yielding an unstable array of modal canons that drift in & out of "tune," causing all manner of inter-voice beating & assorted psycho-acoustic effects.

Generators will be available on February 21. The album can be pre-ordered here.

Generators:

1. "Issue Generator (for Eliane Radigue)"
2. "High Zero Generator"

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