Malört (2020) is an 8-channel piece (summarily reduced to stereo) commissioned by Luis Fernandes for Semibreve in Braga, Portugal during the festival’s initial COVID-era staging.

While initially conceived to be staged in a XVII Century Monastery on the city’s outskirts (pictured to your right/below) it was nonetheless premiered online on October 24th 2020 & ran for exactly two days on a bespoke subpage of the festival’s site before going dark; always love a planned obsolescence/scarcity model affair executed in the digital realm (that said you can hear an excerpt of the middle section to your right/below.)

Here is the (fantastic, frankly) writing around the piece c/o Pedro Rocha:

Following Fullerton Whitman's deep dedication to modular synthesizers, Mallört was mostly built with Serge synthesizers, to which some voice, voice synthesization and field recording fragments were added, among other elements. The piece was conceived to adapt to a listening process that can be “turned on” and “turned off” at any moment. The qualities of the sound material and the lack of resolution reinforce a somber or even claustrophobic tone, not unrelated to the times we are living in. However, insolvency is not alien to this musician’s work, just as the absence of a settled familiarity and an intentional or sustained emotional retribution.

The tension and disquiet of Fullerton Whitman’s music are perhaps symptoms of the search for a fluidity that refuses taxonomies and stylistic canon. The timbers take off from usages sedimented by the history of electronic music; the rhythms multiply like “aerosols” and the cadences associated to musical genres are deformed, like elastic bands transforming and crisscrossing.

The increasing internalization of decision processes by Fullerton Whitman’s hardware system turns the musician into more of an orchestrator than a direct generator of musical events. He defines  internal matters and clocks that constitute the basis for an ecosystem but not necessarily the way in which the creatures that inhabit it develop and interact. And the perspective of the piece which presents itself as if belonging to a line of work that expands, not through the domain of control but instead through those of an enchantment inherent to a progressive abdication of control, and highlights its enigmatic glow, especially in moments when electronic sounds are occasionally and oftly penetrated by acoustic songs. The intensities and complexities of Mallörtgo through us, coming from the past and the future. From its paradoxical tensions, sometimes more subtle and other times more daring, it exudes a quality which is as regenerating as it is abyssal.