Keith Fullerton Whitman: Lisbon

In the last half of the 20th century, it took alot of nerve for composers in academic circles to write tonal, listenable music.

In the “serious” music world, if you wanted to be taken seriously, your work had to be an impenetrable, dissonant intellectual piece of unplayable wankery. I know; I was there. I spent countless hours poring over Carter’s byzantine (and IMO, pointless) complexity, all the while wondering if anyone actually enjoyed this stuff.

I was an outcast for writing stuff that actually had recognizable harmonic structure. I was also the only guy in the department who didn’t have a scraggly beard. I think those two things might have been related.

Guys like Walter Piston were writing tonal and emotional music, but were often viewed as reactionaries in their own time. Piston, of course, wrote one of the cornerstone textbooks on orchestration, and his work, though a bit on the spiky side to a newcomer, carried more imagination, wit and emotion than a conservatory of elitist serialists could ever hope to muster.

(Incidentally, Naxos is in the process of recording and releasing much of his work, which has been unjustifiably obscure on record until recently)

Piston might have had a beard; I can’t remember, but if he did, I imagine it kept it free of crouton crumbs.

The same thing seems to be happening to electronic music these days. You’ve got two camps. On one side, the popularists simply make music. These guys get deals on record labels you can actually find (even if it takes some effort to do so). Some of it is truly dreadful and contrived, but there are some imaginative folks who have the brains to make it interesting without pandering to silly “art” concerns.

The other camp wants so badly to be taken seriously that it’s almost silly. These guys have a serious Grizzly Adams/Unabomber fixation going on with the facial hair. They often release their music on tiny little basement labels in “limited editions” with “custom” packaging that usually consists of crayon renderings on stock cardboard.

I remember wading through Mille Plateaux’s apparently seminal Clicks and Cuts compilation a few years back, thinking that I was supposed to be liking it, but wondering why. Two-and-a-half hours of absolutely nothing interesting happening was the impression I got. Sure, it had its moments, but as a whole, it came off as one person after another showing off technique at the expense of any sort of emotional involvement. Witness what Autechre’s become. Every album becomes more remote and more frustrating, and often the payoff is too meager to justify the investment.

Keith Fullerton Whitman falls squarely in the middle of these two camps. Sure, Whitman has a beard, but I’d imagine he keeps it clean. He’s a composer-in-residence at Harvard, and he’s been an avid electronic experimenter. He also happens to write audaciously good music.

My first exposure to his music was 2002’s Playthroughs. The record was a glorious excercise in stasis and subtlety, but it was also quite beautiful and hypnotic. The official follow-up (he did alot of things in between) was 2005’s Multiples, which ventured away from the guitar-sampling based drones of Playthroughs in favor of electroacoustic experimentation.

Multiples was a bit more esoteric, but Whitman still wrote music you could understand and connect with without donning a tweed jacket and smoking a pipe. It was a bit uneven, but at times so beautiful as to be shocking. The most important thing was that Whitman was writing intellectual music that was actually listenable, and these days, that’s pretty damned revolutionary.

Lisbon is something of an interim work, being billed as an Ep, though it clocks in at 42 minutes. (In a way I’m reminded of the Orb’s 40-minute “Blue Room” single, which actually topped the English charts on its release) It’s a live set from Spain, though the recording is immaculate and there is no indication of crowd interaction. It seems to fall out of Whitman’s regular progression, and it comes off as a bit casual, but this is still a record most of the knob-twiddling crowd would kill to have on their resumes.

There’s nothing particularly new or different here in terms of content, as the proceedings sound very similar to what he was doing on Playthroughs. What’s different is a sense of change and development.

While previous records were largely an excercise in stasis and the feeling of suspended time, Lisbon is more of a developmental effort with a sense of tension. The piece starts out sounding similar to “Modena,” but the sine-waves are overlaid with snippets of squelch and surface noise, and they gradually speed up and unravel. There’s a definite harmonic progression, and by the 9-minute mark, the track has completely changed character.

An underlying rhythmic structure slowly takes form, and at 15:24, the surface noise becomes an integral element and the pace becomes insistent and almost frenetic. A low-pass sweep takes on tonality until the 20-minute mark, it’s ascended in pitch to an approximation of My Bloody Valentine’s orchestral guitar drones. The guitar tones ride an elegaic two-chord progression, which taken alone seems somewhat modest, but if you’ve been listening for the last 20 minutes, they’re huge for the buildup that’s preceeded them.

At 24 minutes, almost everything else has dropped out, leaving only the multilayered guitars. An harmonized melody appears, grounded around a pitch axis but still somehow exhultant, sounding like one of Robert Fripp’s electric hymns from the days of No Pussyfooting. It’s clearly Whitman’s nod to a seminal influence in the genre, and rather than being an intrusive or ironic tip-of-the-hat, it’s wonderfully integrated into the whole, and somehow inevitable in hindsight.

By the 28-minute mark, it all disintegrates, leaving silence punctuated by seemingly random percussion and equipment noise for five minutes. I won’t call it a breakdown, but it serves the same purpose. Just as the ears find a pulse underneath it all, the drones from the beginning of the piece re-enter, no longer tranquil but straining visibly against the smears of feedback. The guitar drone returns, two octaves higher in pitch, now somewhat sinister in tone, and everything builds to a massive crescendo, peaking and then dying at 40:20, leaving only a quiet recapitulation of the opening motif to ride out the last minute of the piece.

So yeah, it’s actually a work with an exposition-development-recapitulation structure, which is actually somewhat novel. It’s a nice break from character to hear Whitman working along the x-axis for a change. Though it’s no break from the sound of Playthroughs or Multiples, the change in approach towards an actual structure is surprising and incredibly effective. It’s a great record for folks who haven’t heard Whitman’s music, and for fans like myself, it carries a certain sense of nostalgia while pointing towards something very different.

Lisbon comes out at the same time as the Track4 (2Waysuperimposed) Ep (which is a great remix of a Playthroughs track). You can find them at Boomkat (worldwide) or Forced Exposure (stateside).

(BTW, if anyone knows where I can find a copy of 21:30 for Acoustic Guitar, let me know.)