The two tracks on this cassette, titled Side 1 and Side A respectively are reworkings of recordings using Whitman’s ‘Playthroughs’ system, which he premiered on his debut album under his real name on the Kranky label back in 2002. The system took it’s input from an acoustic guitar fed this into his purpose-built Max patch which pitch read the guitar notes and produced sine or square waves of the same frequency subsequently feeding these through some sort of tape-delay emulation array, if my memory serves me correctly.
Here Whitman re-feeds this material through further processes, much as he did on the Track4(2waysuperimposed) ep on Room 40, only here the processes seem somewhat more complex and both involve his favourite tool of the now a modular analogue Doepfer synthesizer. Side 1, recorded in a mere hour and a quarter, bears the most resemblance to the original material of Playthroughs. It starts off with low smooth booming tones, spacious but sinister which gently accrete some square-wave surf and gradually sprout from the ditch dropping higher frequency blips and bloops (the random, accidental pitch readings of the original system?) in their path. This feels like Playthroughs era Whitman as seen through hundred-year-old glass, the purity of the digital sound clouded by the analogue processing. The fog rises and falls throughout, stripping away the busy detail to just rumbling bass before letting us catch a glimpse again. Obscure/reveal/obscure/reveal/obscure and then just when the pattern has become clear Whitman reveals the original source as subtle string plucks drift into reach.
Side A is an altogether different affair, Whitman seems to have opted again for the strategy of his first (I think) tape release (A Bogan Apocalypse) using two conflicting approaches to the same instrument. Here the source drone remains entirely absent until about twenty minutes in. The piece dominated instead by what for the time I will call bleeps, even (given their analogue character) era-bleeps. This description, however, does the track an enormous dis-service, this is bleepage at its most engrossing. How Whitman has wrought such variety of bleeps is beyond me. The length, but most importantly the timbre of these sounds seem for at least the first five minutes to never repeat themselves, initially each is granted the space in which to ring out fully, enhanced by great use of the stereo width. Not happy to rest in simple minimalia for long, the density grows until we are surrounded by dozens of buzzing insects, gurgling deep-sea cephalopods and numerous other organic phosphorescents. As the swarm amasses the creatures begin to interact in ways not possible in the spacious opening, setting off flickering chain reactions until the chattering begins to subside and the whole flock begins to circle as one into the inevitable drone section. The joy of this part is in the occasional miscreant, the bleep that refuses to be tamed, darting against the flow, but these too subside and drift off gently sunset-wards.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with drone music, even with harmony, and this is an excellent tape, certainly the best music to these ears that I’ve written up here as yet. I guess I would just really love to hear Whitman take the analogue overload in the other direction at the close of this second piece.
This is in plentiful stock at mimaroglu.
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