You probably know Keith Fullerton Whitman as breakcore maven Hrvatski, a man who played in a few bands before developing an obsession with Squarepusher and deciding to probe the most hectic beats possible on labels such as Planet \xB5 and his own Reckankreuzung, as well as falling into the Tigerbeat6 orbit. You also may know Hrvatski by his pithy electronic music write-ups for the Forced Exposure website, penned while he worked in sales for the revered distributor. But the Keith Fullerton Whitman of Playthroughs has kept a lower profile. Starting last year with the 21:30 for Acoustic Guitar EP, Whitman began experimenting with subtle music based on laptop-processed guitar tones. While he's tinkered with this approach here and there, Playthroughs is his first sustained exploration of quiet sound.
If you've listened to the more drone-focused side of electronic music in the last few years, you've definitely heard the core elements that make up Playthroughs. There is no radical breakthrough in texture here, nothing to make you turn your head and say, "What the hell was that?" Playthroughs consists entirely of processed guitar, but the tones are light on harmonics, with many possessing an almost sine wave-level of clarity. As the thin drones hang in the air and shift this way and that, they harmonize with other drones and find themselves poked with fuzzy implements of static. Nothing terribly earth-shattering about this composition method.
It's true that much of Playthroughs seems familiar on the surface, but I don't think it an exaggeration to say that this record essentially perfects this particular style of music. It's an album of meticulous balance, Zen focus, and tiny gestures that carry great force, where each individual piece of sound is carefully placed to maximize impact. The first 3\xBD minutes of "feedback zwei", for example, consists of overlapping blankets of clean, piercing electronic feedback that remain in constant motion, creating new harmonic patterns with each passing second. And an unexpected cloud of pink noise slowly envelops the sound field, bathing the entire track in a warm digital mist and drastically shifting the perspective. Eventually sub-bass tones provide even more glaring contrast (be sure to listen to this track on good headphones). It all sounds simple on paper, but the emotional impact of the transformation in "feedback zwei" is completely overwhelming, never failing to produce a lump in my throat.
The five tracks on Playthroughs were designed to work together, and a similar palette is used throughout. The opening "track3a(2waynice)" (obviously titles are of no import) finds Whitman trying his hand with the phase techniques of La Monte Young and Ryoji Ikeda, showing how much weird tension can be created when two or three tones that don't quite match up. The style of "fib01a" has the easiest reference point, being quite close in texture and feel to 94diskont-era Oval, minus the CD skips and with a greater understanding of extended tones. "ACGTR SVP" contains the thickest drones on Playthroughs, as guitars processed to sound like organs swell and recede. And the closing "modena" is 17 minutes of sonic bliss, strangely beautiful electronic taps that seem to hang in the air like a handful of airborne glitter catching light in extreme slow motion.
If I were talking to you about this album over coffee somewhere, I'd probably slide my copy across the table, say, "Give it a listen and see what you think," and then change the subject. Everyone knows the problem of building something up to a friend-- after hearing "You're going to love it, it's so perfect-- incredible!" a number of times, your expectations balloon to a size that no actual experience could ever hope to fill. I'm doubly reluctant to tell you what I think of Playthroughs because of the nature of the music. When I was talking up the Boredoms' Super Ae a couple years ago, I knew it was the kind of album that grabbed the listener by the throat and shook him around the room. Love it or hate it, Super Ae had the sort of impact you could feel through your body, and I had no doubt that everyone would understand just how colossal it was. Playthroughs is an entirely different animal, with a much more understated appeal. Still, I'm writing a record review for Pitchfork here, so I have to give you my honest opinion: this is by some margin the best album I've heard in 2002, and there are only about ten weeks left.
