Keith Fullerton Whitman
Lisbon

[Kranky; 2006]

Styles: electro-acoustic, process music, field recording, ambient minimalism
Others: Fennesz, Gas, Stephan Mathieu, Greg Davis, Jim O’Rourke

As a rule, a sound can’t be both visceral and ambient. But as with many rules, Keith Fullerton Whitman’s music is an exception here. Like Brian Eno’s Music for Airports and Rafael Toral’s Wavefield, Whitman’s laptop-abetted adventures in tone warping are shockingly immediate; they’re sounds that need not be ruminated over to be appreciated. For a man who’s lectured at Harvard, Whitman creates very nonacademic music. His glacial, glitchy guitar pieces work as quickly and affectingly as his filthiest Hrvatski breakbeats. Never once do you have to pull your headphones back and ask yourself if you’re really enjoying or just making yourself enjoy Whitman’s music – you just are.

It’s appropriate then that a gritty street scene – paint-chipped dumpster, graffiti, chipped stone, drab architecture – graces the inside of Lisbon’s digipak, and even moreso that we see bills for a seemingly highbrow music festival plastered on these dilapidated walls. Whitman situates his music in a gut-level register, but never once calls his capital-A-Art distinction into question.

It helps to keep this image in mind as the album begins, as it’s tempting to expect stiffness and even pretension based on its concept. For this recording, Whitman took his celebrated Playthroughs system – a guitar-’n’-laptop setup that deals heavily in sine waves – on the road and played solo for 40 minutes. Live, improvised, and unedited, this October 2005 Portugal tour recording seems like exactly the sort of album destined to be branded "for diehards only." Instead of a lengthy slog through the esoteric extensions of Whitman’s most subtle instrumental system, we actually get a mature document of an artist in transition.

The piece’s opening strains recall the Playthroughs LP. Like the songs on that album, Lisbon’s first utterances devote much of their attention to timbre. Whitman’s ear for engaging, rich tones plays a large part in his music’s accessibility, and he’s on his A-game here, crafting serene washes of blossoming drone. Each new note feels like a revelation, a new birth; where lesser "soundscaping" so often comes across as a pale imitation of the natural world, Whitman’s music creates its own world. Each guitar stroke feels more like a ripple than a pluck, sending calming reverberations throughout.

After establishing this oceanic, all-encompassing environment, Whitman introduces us to its inhabitants: skittering descending and ascending tones that sound like space ships, modulating robotic blips, and rumbling low end. By the 15-minute mark, the composition is so rife with nuance that we can no longer parse it into individual sounds. It becomes a viscous whole.

It’s as a drifting continent that Lisbon draws to a head. Volume and loudness increase to rival any Sunn amp drone metal recording, and for possibly the first time in his career, Whitman shreds. Over the bliss and buzz, we hear sweaty licks that would dazzle the most jaded of guitar store clerks. It’s like hearing a Fripp and Eno or Boris and Merzbow collaboration condensed into the work of one pair of hands. Whitman might enjoy select company along the ambient/visceral axis, but now he alone holds the distinction of making music that you could consider both soothing and bitchin’.

While he has his fun with this unexpected bit of traditional axemanship, Whitman knows better than to take himself too seriously, and he forces his piece to dramatize what an excessive display of virtuosity does unwittingly: collapse on itself. Just when this raucous tide crests, it begins to lose its fluidity and sound like a malfunctioning animatronic creature. The dam bursts, and when Whitman launches back into guitar god mode to recoup, blustery sine waves interfere and send the piece plunging into an overdriven haze that eventually dissolves into silence. It’s a great comic chain of events, one of those rare displays of mastery of bad style in which we can practically hear the artist laughing the entire time.

Mock humbled and forced to rebuild, Whitman indulges in a little point-and-click abstraction before he regains his footing, and from there on out his performance is masterful, juxtaposing heart-piercing ambience and soul-sucking subsonic drones to leave us suspended in a lovely, ambiguous constellation of engrossing sounds. Amen.

1. [untitled]

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