Keith Fullerton Whitman

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Acid Causality ± Satellite Mix ØØ¡.

One of the first concerts I played after moving (back) to New York was at e-flux’s Bar Laika space here in Clinton Hill, at the invitation of Sanna Almajedi; In the interim it had essentially become my local: great cocktails & food, plus an incredible program of music, film, & art events overseen by Sanna, Lily, & Anton.

Obviously all of this has all come to an end for the foreseeable future & one of many palpable losses is the ability to casually stroll in on a given weekday night & see/hear a Gordon Matta-Clark film, or a Tarek Atoui performance; kind of unreal how their programming crystallized so many of my disparate interests into neighborhood events that could be seen & heard amongst a similarly clued-in crowd, and at a stone’s throw.

Naturally, I leaped at the chance to contribute to the post-physicality of the space’s existence, in the form of an hour-long program of new, otherwise unreleased music, inaugurating their Satellite Mix Series:

See this SoundCloud audio in the original post

“Shortly after returning to New York City in October 2018, I began recording a series of extended pieces applying analogue computing concepts to generate fluid, evolving values that were mapped to formal elements (pitch, rhythm, timing, spatialization, filtering, etc.) normally driven by fixed-value sequencing.

This mix presents edits of a series of four sessions forged between November 11, 2018 and November 27, 2019: First, a suite of Vocoded kick-drums and sample and hold canon melodies run through a sentient resonator network; then a six-voice wavetable canon with requisite acid bass-line and pitched-down drums; then a suite for hand-percussion and modeled metallophones; then a high-feedback Karplus-Strong wash.

These were immaculately conceived from the tools on hand and the methodologies of Norbert Wiener, Maatrameru, et. al, although stylistic/traceback shout-outs are in order to Stephan Wittwer's score for Fischli & Weiss' Der Rechte Weg (1983), to Mikel Rouse's Quorum (1984), and to Steve Poindexter's Computer Madness (1989).”

These pieces (tracks!) were all recorded in single sessions/takes, live-to-stereo, & there is a (now) a huge trove of them living on a hard drive array in the studio/basement; please get in touch if you’d like to hear/release any of them (this is the closest I’ve come in 18 months to “finishing” any of this material!)