Since moving away from his splatter-break Hrvatski alias roughly a decade ago, Keith Fullerton Whitman has spent many albums and EPs winding his way through the long history of electronic music. Where he once found inspiration in the fast-changing and endlessly malleable world of laptop computers and customized Max/MSP patches, he eventually made a deliberate shift to explore the more limited possibilities of earlier technology. Electronic music was once the domain of academics and researchers with access to vast rooms filled with pulsing tubes and clusters of snaking cables. Only those with a commission were allowed anywhere near the machinery. Whitman has spent much of the last decade revisiting the approach and technology of those days and finding ways to personalize and update those tools, bringing the worlds of analog and digital together in a series of lower-key albums and EPs.
Whitman has an uncanny knack for taking the analog soundmakers and ring modulators of yore and applying his precise and detailed theoretical constructs to something that sounds, above all, musical. Pieces build and shift and go to unexpected places; textures feel grounded in a tradition but also open and exploratory. These characteristic virtues are here on his new album. "Generator" is a piece that Whitman premiered in 2009 and performed in different variations over the next couple of years. These two versions of the piece, very different in tone but with some overlap in terms of musical elements, were recorded at separate shows in September 2010.
There's a tiny detail in the early going of "Issue Generator (for Eliane Radigue)", recorded at a show paying tribute to the French electronic music pioneer, that lets us know we're in for something special. As a sine wave hum in the 100 Hz range fades in, we can hear someone coughing and weight being shifted on chairs. This is, in other words, a recording of live electronic music that was made by positioning microphones in a space rather than taking the feed from the sound board. That it's a recording of sound in a room rather than just an electrical signal is important; Whitman's M.O. is to explore the emotional possibilities at the intersection of disparate technologies and histories-- where digital meets analog, "live" meets studio, old meets new. And on these two tracks, we're hearing the results of these experiments in an approximation of how they sounded to those in attendance, imperfect rooms with their own resonances and people with respiratory issues and squeaking chairs.
After that opening drone, "Issue Generator (for Eliane Radigue)" shifts to a piece of classically pulsing minimalism, the rich tones of Whitman's synth rig spilling out notes and scales and rhythm. Sometimes the movement of the piece takes on an almost baroque air, echoing the mathematical perfection of Bach in the way phrases are proposed and resolved, and it is tuneful and melodic even as the structure is hard to apprehend, lingering just out of reach. It feels weirdly short even at 17 minutes, as its constantly shifting patterns and harmonic combination hint at a piece that could conceivably be endless.
While "Issue Generator (for Eliane Radigue)" is gorgeous and endlessly replayable, "High Zero Generator" veers further in the direction of experiment. Its first nine minutes are all crackle, bleep, static, and whirr, a lengthy excursion into the realm of pure texture. While the sound of the pinging tones and groaning springs have their own sort of magic, the piece's first half winds up feeling like a long build-up to the sequenced notes of its second, which uses textures and a compositional arc similar to the first piece. While "Issue Generator" is rich and full, "High Zero Generator" feels pinched and claustrophobic, as if fat synth tones were being shoved into a small hole and frayed into pieces. Together, the "Generator" pieces form a terrifically engaging contrast, a fascinating 35 minutes of electronic music that, while drawing heavily from the past, also sounds like nothing else out there now.
