Growing up in NNJ in the late 80s, I began experimenting with “Live Electronic” guitar-processing setups as soon as my guitar teacher (the wonderful Chris Amelar; check his work on Dream Theater / Dixie Dregs phenom Jordan Rudess’ 1993 album “Listen”) started turning me on to players such as Allan Holdsworth, Fred Frith, Derek Bailey, Keith Rowe, Masayuki Takayanagi, and the like.

I had this amazing "Norma" brand guitar where you could independently remove the pole-pieces from any of the 4 (!) pickups while you were playing; these were entirely microphonic and would grab any & all sound-sources happening near the guitar which led to all kinds of Electro-Acoustic interference. I would affix a "Flex-A-Ton" excited with an E-Bow to the pickups & send the whole thing through Lexicon Jam-Man & Digitech DSP-12 rackmount units; the result was this great raw square-wave low-end drone. I played a few gigs in the mid-late 90s with this setup; in the Twisted Village shop with Damon & Naomi, then a memorable one a few weeks later opening for Yo La Tengo at the Middle East Downstairs (during soundcheck I sliced my hand open with the outsized razor blade I was using to "prepare" said guitar, but went ahead and played anyway).

The following year, after seeing Kaffe Matthews perform a LiSa-based set at one of Billy Ruane’s Green St. Grill shows, I acquired a Mac G3 Powerbook and started experimenting with a powerful (but sadly extinct) audio software package called "Spark". I found that in the "Realtime FX Machine" mode I could string together VST plugins in a modular array & route any sound-source through said matrix, receiving instant feedback. The trick was in getting the right order of processors & after a few weeks I had come up with a tried and true signal path:

Input --> MDA Tracker --> Steinberg Karlette --> GRM Tools Shuffler --> Spark Reverb --> Output

The beauty of this chain was that, if I played a guitar (at this point, a cheap Bentley acoustic with a Dean Markley in-hole pickup) carefully through a volume pedal, fading in each note to remove the attacks, the MDA Tracker plugin would correctly guess the pitch of the note(s) played into it and synthesize a nice round sine tone at the exact same pitch. The slight inconsistencies in intonation would be translated in floating point values to the Tracker, whose variable-wave output was sent to the Karlette; all those slightly out of tune pitch classes would slowly build up in a near-infinite feedback loop. I panned the four "heads" of Karlette hard left, just left, just right, and hard right (the tap times set at 2 seconds, 1.98 seconds, 1.96 seconds, and 1.94 seconds) & this yielded a very slowly shifting cloud of pure enharmonic sine tones going in & out of phase and cancelling each other out all across the stereo spectrum. In itself a very dense sound, but when fed into the GRM Shuffler, subtle rhythmic possibilities began to reveal themselves & when that was fed into a rather unremarkable spring reverb emulation, well, let's just say it was a very unique combination of sounds & I was instnatly smitten.

Using this system I recorded about 2 DAT's worth of improvisations, mostly 10 minute pieces with slow attack & decay. As much as I love completely atonal and dissonant music, I found that the overall effect was much more impressive when I played in a modal fashion, pealing out multi-octave arpeggiations one note at a time, then adding the one foundational note that would shift the tonality of the whole tone cluster in a completely different direction, then reduce feedback, build that up again & repeat ad infinitum. One wrongly played or incorrectly tracked note-choice could ruin the entire performance, but in time I became familiar enough with the system that I could play in an almost subconscious manner; intrinsically I knew what note needed to be played next, an almost "automatic music" with only one stage of human interaction, and a few tweaks of the plugin parameters for slight variation and formal buildup.

I made a few copies of a 3" CD-R of the two most successful pieces and gave them out to friends. Kurt Ralske asked me to play a show he was curating at Brownie's in NYC, where I sat onstage with a computer for the first time. There was a high level of excitement on my part in again playing long-form, blissed-out guitar drones in a rock club; it was the perfect riposte to the jarring, short-attention span freak breakcore freakouts I was most known for at that point & even back then, getting somewhat tired of. One of the discs landed in the hands of Apartment B label head Danny Wyatt, who graciously reissued the two pieces as a proper, 5-inch CD, "21:30 For Acoustic Guitar" in early 2000, the subsequent distribution of which cast a wide net & led to an invitation to open for Labradford in 2001, who recommended I send some music to their label, kranky; this was incredible news as I did and still do consider Joel & Bruce the "heavyweights" of crossover rock-drone, penning many a review of their catalogue for fanzines at the time.

At this point, I figured it was time to take it to the next level & build something (from scratch) that was a bit more reliable & varied than the above plugin-centric setup. Back in college ca. 1993-1994 I had been using Opcode's Max to build MIDI-based performance pieces (under the tutelage of Dr. Richard Boulanger) although in the interim years I had little contact with any music software other than Studio Vision and Sound Edit 16 (all of the Hrvatski-music was produced via MIDI and a hardware Akai sampler). After retiring from my day job, I went on a working safari in Australia where I finally had the time/resources to purchase the contemporary Cycling '74 version of Max-MSP. Within one massive bringing-up-to-speed week spent beachside in Newcastle & Sydney, I was already playing concerts with a superior version of my previous Spark-based system, including a mind-bendingly loud duo set with Oren Ambarchi at the Sydney Opera House. The power & endlessness of the Max-MSP environment, to this day, amazes me; there's little that can't be done within the realms of digital audio and control data generation & manipulation (back then you were limited within the confines of the processing power of the host computer, but this no longer an issue!) I repeat this often, but I absolutely love that you start with a blank slate and & are forced to build everything yourself; exactly the kind of modus I still get behind, especially in a market inundated with "plug and play" solutions & endless sample libraries for producing cookie-cutter, genre music.

For a straight year, I recorded endlessly using variants of the Playthroughs 1.0 system, resulting in approximately 18 hours of music. I whittled this down to the three finest compositions on file, dovetailed in a few non Max-MSP pieces of room-toned feedback-resonance experiments & offline Super Vocoder timestretched acoustic guitar, and christened it an album. "Playthroughs" was released in October of 2002 & continues to sell in record numbers (especially for an album comprised largely of processed sine tones!) A couple of absurdly great reviews in Pitchfork, then The Wire really propelled the whole project forward in an incredible way (much later, in 2018 Joshua Rothman wrote an extremely hearfelt take on the record in The New Yorker & and of course the @ironyisadeadscene TikTok review from late 2021 seemed to clue an entirely new generation in to this “Tasty Piece Of Good Drone”).

Between 2002 and 2004 I played the Playthroughs piece hundreds of times across the world, adding functionality to certain modules & deleting others all the while. These constant renovations, coupled with my recent acquisition of a collection of hardware-based Electro-Harmonix effects pedals to process the guitar signal pre-input culminated in the completion of the landmark release Playthroughs V3.0, used to perform and record a follow-up, “Recorded in Lisbon” in October 2006, soon augmented by a palindromic “Australian Tour” Minimax, “Track4(2WaySuperImposed)”

It was around this time I decided that I needed a break from the endlessness of engineering bespoke audio software, and for a good decade thereafter I performed exclusively, & blissfully on Eurorack-format Modular Synthesizers of varying degrees of complexity (see the Generators, Occlusions, & Redactions pages). Other than a commission to composed specifically-tuned music for the seventh & final “Chakra” level in a video game developed by Deepak Chopra (check the Hi-Res AUDIO “L7” tape) I rarely touched the Playthroughs software. This went on for a good decade, until the occasion of Kranky’s 20th Anniversary concerts in Chicago, during which I reprised the piece at Constellation using the old systems & laptop, tried and true. A series of “Second Wind” & Anniversary performances has been ongoing ever since, including performances at Musée des Artes de Nantes as part of SOY Festival, in Niigata at The Labyrinth (recordings of both were placed on Bandcamp, then as a Hi-Res AUDIO cassette, “Late Playthroughs” in 2020), L’Auditori in Barcelona for Sampler Series, & e-flux in Brooklyn for the 20th anniversary of the kranky album (for which the patch was almost completely rewritten for contemporary Apple Silicon, along with a performable video layer for the first time, replacing the static “Phase/Travel” film most commonly used when A/V performances were requested).

Over the Spring & Summer of 2023, an alternate vein of the piece took root, based entirely on Andrew Ostler’s newer pitch-tracking, tape-delay, and granular algorithms in his disting EX synthesizer module (easily the best embedded-computer platform in Euro) which led to hardware-based performances at Shift , Kyle Garner’s Loft, & Union Pool in Brooklyn, Never-Ending Books in New Haven, Washington Baths in Portland, & Opus 40 in Saugerties. These were collected in the “Reciprocals” suite along with a release for Bryan Kasenic’s “Music For Healing” -lineage Going In series, “A Stable Environment” (a nod to the system’s perceived levels of maturity).

The source material for every piece on Playthroughs is guitar: acoustic, electric or otherwise. From Sept. 2001 to April 2002. Keith Fullerton Whitman transformed raw guitar tones via laptop computer into the tracks on Playthroughs. Whitman has used ring modulators, granular re-synthesis algorithms, banks of delays and special effects in a process that owes much to Terry Riley's Time Lag Accumulator setup and Steve Reich's Phase Pieces. Technology and Whitman's careful selection of notes combine to create shimmering drones and deep waves of sound. Though the source material was improvised guitar and the procesing involved computer technology, Playthroughs reflects Whitman's mastery of composition.

Performances:

(slowly adding and/or remembering performances of the “Playthroughs” piece to a master-list here; get in touch if you set up or attended one between 2000 & now!)

White Horse (High Wycombe, March 2003)

Ze Dos Bois (Lisbon, October 2005)

Constellation (Chicago, December 2013)

l’Auditori (Barcelona, May 2017)

The Labyrinth (Naeba, September 2018)
Max Fish (New York, October 2018)
Musé d'Arts de Nantes (Nantes, November 2018)

Schoolhouse (Brooklyn, May 2019)
Abasement 52 (New York, August 2019)
Silent Night #20 (Prague, November 2019)
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e-flux (Brooklyn, October 2022)

Shift (Brooklyn, February 2023)
Present Sounds (Brooklyn, May 2023)
Never Ending Books (New Haven, May 2023)
Washington Baths (Portland, June 2023)
Union Pool (Brooklyn, July 2023)
Opus 40 (Saugerties, August 2023)