Keith Fullerton Whitman's 2002 album Playthroughs brought me both comfort and a feeling of being alone. I experienced an aesthetic connection with that minimal ambient record that is arguably the sole reason art exists. An artist creates something that is his way of saying: "You know how __________ and __________, and it feels like __________?" And I play the CD and-- despite his communicating with music rather than words-- I'm able to say, "Yeah, I know exactly what you mean." The space between us is diminished.
And yet, Playthroughs gave me a sense of isolation because I felt as if no one else heard in it quite what I did. I received a number of e-mails from readers about my Playthroughs review telling me that "there was no there there" and I was just pretending to like it to be cool or deep or something. Others readers went as far as claiming that anyone with half a brain and a single finger could make that album. Plenty of people did like Playthroughs, but to most of them it was just an ambient album among many ambient albums, a bit more skeletal than most, perhaps, but nothing to go crazy over. I maintain that there were a million ways Playthroughs could have been different, but very few ways it could have been better.
To tide us over to the next Whitman full-length, Multiples, Kranky offers the vinyl-only Antithesis EP, which contains four worthy tracks that didn't fit the new full-length. The Antithesis material is very much an odds-and-sods hodgepodge: four pieces recorded over a span of eight years in different home studios with widely variable set-ups. All of the tracks are instrumental compositions created by layering traditional sounds like guitar, feedback, keyboards, and percussion, without computer sources or digital processing.
"Twin Guitar Rhodes Viola Drone (For Lamonte Young)", recorded in 1994, is the oldest of the pieces, and it fittingly has a shoegaze feel. Although Young is namechecked, the feedback hum and recurring three-note suggestion of I/IV/V chords are pop tropes, far from gallery-presented art music. The song has a unique melancholy vibe coupled with a sense of endlessness, as if it could continue to unspool forever. And its primitive-sounding recording places its aural space in the vicinity of where Windy & Carl and Flying Saucer Attack were in 1994, with a bit of VU/Theater of Eternal Music viola folded in.
"Obelisk (For Kurt Schwitters)" is from 1997 and would have fit on one of the Storm/Swarm/Throne drone compilations Asphodel released around that time. With echoing bits of tribal percussion and held tones that sound as if they're disappearing down some mantle-bound cavern, "Obelisk" is not far from the dark ambient of Steve Roach. "Rhodes Viola Multiple", from 1995, is closest in sound to Playthroughs, with an overlapping series of keyboard throbs that combine with guitar feedback into a constantly shifting drone.
The closing "Schnee" is a timeless and terrifically evocative piece of music, one that sounds uncannily like vintage krautrock. I've heard comparisons to Ash Ra Tempel, but it sounds more like Popol Vuh doing soundtrack work for Werner Herzog. Its ancient, blurry guitar tone and endless cascade of cymbal reference a time when psychedelic rock was tightly bound to the medieval, a connection exploited to maximum effect by Genesis and Gentle Giant.
Each time Whitman offers a glimpse of what else he's been up to in the past 10 years, we get a deeper understanding of his impressive range. He started out as an impressive drum-n-bass beat technician and then experimented with minimal ambient music to unveil some worthwhile instrumental rock-ish sounds. And to think, I once thought of this dude only as the guy who wrote the witty and informed blurbs on German electronic music for the Forced Exposure catalog.
