Zwanzig.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that “Playthroughs,” perhaps my most enduring & well-loved recording, has turned 20.
What began as a way to transition from the short-attention-span digital micro-edit chaos of Hrvatski (which I’d been assembling in a completely unsustainable, self-destructive way during all-night marathon sessions) into a means to grieve during & after the slow, protracted decline of my mother Alison Elizabeth Palfrey Fullerton Whitman (my middle name is, in fact, the continuation of her maiden family name/bloodline) due to Ovarian cancer somehow, magically, connected with an audience of open-minded folks. The reception to what all hands were predicting to be a one-shot CD-only blip in the (even then) vast kranky catalogue took everyone by surprise; certainly me the most. I had all but stopped making any kind of even conceptually dancefloor-adjacent music at that stage and, despite a few years of sinking into the work & traveling the world in lieu of sitting down and processing the loss, eventually came to terms with everything.
A series of things has transpired over the past month or two to make it feel like the whole enterprise has in fact met its audience & made a lasting impression over the past two decades. First, Anton & Sanna over at e-flux proposed an anniversary concert & reprise of the “Phase” film that often accompanied performances, replete with post-performance Q&A by Sasha Frere-Jones (who I’d been in regular contact with in the early 2000s). I’d been performing “Playthroughs” on occasion, but solely as a museum piece (ancient G4 laptop barely running the ca. 2005 iteration of the patch in Max-MSP 4.6) & this felt like a good time to contemporize the whole system while decluttering the bloat that had accumulated in the post-Lisbon era (all hail Cycling ‘74 & their ongoing innovations within Max-MSP; then & now the first & last word in bespoke audio-environments).
Second, and completely apropos of the above, kranky co-founder Bruce Adams’ book “You're with Stupid: kranky, Chicago, and the Reinvention of Indie Music” has hit the shelves worldwide, and is an absolute hoot; I can’t recommend it enough. Properly capturing the mise-en-scene of 90s-Chicago independent distribution & label antics in a completely enjoyable way, it’s an incredible snapshot of a time in which, frankly, we all had it way too good & simply didn’t know it. I urge you to seek it out, and/or go and see Bruce on his ongoing book-launch tour, including a stop here in NYC at the “Supplemental Space” of David Watson’s new Shift venue in lower Williamsburg on January 26th.
I’ll also be playing at Shift on February 16th w/ the inimitable networked Computer Music heavy & League of Automatic Music Composers founder John Bischoff (who, incidentally, has also been canonized in book form via Ludiger Brümmer’s fantastic “The Hub, Pioneers of Network Music” tome via ZKM/Kehrer Verlag). One of my life-highlights was when John graciously showed me around the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music (CCM) in the mid 2000s (including the OG Buchla Red Panel) & made all of that incredible history real; very much looking forward to debuting a new configuration of wireless reciprocal real-time room-tone processing of live Guitar improvsations, performed with a standalone system comprised of the embedded-computer instruments I’ve been working with as of recent.
Postscript: above is an [edited] recording/transcription of the entire e-flux event, ship-to-shore, including the chat w/ Sasha. Below is the drone-mic recording of the Shift concert: enjoy:
