Lifetime Achievement

Woke up this morning to see my ugly mug (hovering over a 64-channel Midas) staring back from the BandCamp homepage, which was a nice surprise. Thanks to Daniel Dylan Wray for the thorough (thorough!) rundown of my recorded oeuvre, which has been just thriving on their ecosystem for the last year. For as much as I’m at odds with the ca. now reality of music retail (after fighting in the trenches, the front line, and finally in the war room of it all for a good two decades) I do feel that BandCamp offers the best blend of user optimization / customization and a fee / payment structure that actually benefits the musician first & foremost.

To commemorate, I have resumed placing recent music for sale up on their platform in native, often high-resolution formats (generally 24-bit, 96khz uncompressed) including a 10-year anniversary set of ca. now “Generators” (up for pre-order now for a 4/1 release), a pair of recent “Playthroughs” performances (ditto, 5/1) and even a slight 80s General MIDI “Table Music” read of the “Imaginary Film Score” spec (endlessly indebted to the genius of not just the Bands, but Brenda Hutchinson & Slava Tsukerman, Brad Fiedel, Kinuyo “James Banana” Yamashita, Jay Chattaway, etc.)

This is perhaps an opportune moment to point out that the Yearly Subscription is now a clean $60 ($5 a month!) which grants you full streaming AND download access to everything already up, plus all new releases as they’re posted & even cut rates on physical releases. I highly recommend the free iOS / Android BandCamp app; it’s stellar & even allows for offline listening if you so choose.

Absalom, Absalom!

Like many of you, I’ve been exploring the various late-capitalism revenue streams available to musicians with a steady internet connection. There’s the YouTube channel (which I’m currently rethinking), the BandCamp page (which has been doing extremely well), and now I’ve started a Reverb shop for the shifting & exchange of, largely, Eurorack Synthesizer Modules, of which I’ve amassed something of an embarrassment of a backlog, with around 100-120 sitting tidily in their OEM boxes and/or saddled neatly in bubble-wrap following their initial romance-phases.

I will try to keep about 30 items up at a time, and will list new ones as things sell, which has been happening with frightening regularity since the move back to the States. I’m not trying to throw some kind of delusional touched by the hand of God shapes here, but these are all items that I have used to either perform live or record music, and their sale essentially means I get to acquire other items that enable me to perform, record, & release music, which is a nice Yin/Yang result of their time in my life. Plus, clearly due to some clerical error I have just been promoted to Power Caller status, which is kind of nice; everything ships via Priority Mail from Brooklyn, and my 20+ years of mail-order service have my box-packing & fulfillment chops work at phantom-limb levels of muscle-memory.

Relocation.

As of early November, I will be based in the US again; Brooklyn, specifically, for the next few months at least. In many ways this feels like returning, tail between my legs, to the small town in which I grew up after forging a series of domestic (mis-) adventures out in the world that never quite materialized into a State-sanctioned bread-winning situation; only the small town in this case is New York City.

I will kick off my newfound second-borough residence in style with a pair of “Redactions” & “Generators” at e-Flux’s new Bar Laika space in Clinton Hill on January 13th; please come down if we haven’t seen each other for a while, or of course Get In Touch if you’d like to grab a coffee, etc. at some point over the next few months.

As has been the case over the last few years, my main focus for the near-future is in on performing Live Electronic Music; I’m currently seeking opportunities starting in February 2019, and I’m now working with Pedro Gomes for bookings in Europe, so please either get in touch with him, or with me Directly. Similarly, if you’re interested in hosting a reprise of the wonderful A/V collaboration with Pierce Warnecke that we premiered at Semibreve last month, please get in touch with Pedro or Pierce’s agent Remco at DISK Agency.

During the weeks of limbo leading into being reunited with my family here in the States, I’ve made major strides in wrapping up a number of long-delayed recording projects, including a new studio-suite of Playthroughs pieces and a somewhat definitive, private-issue set collecting the first wave of Redactions. There are also a number of recordings for which I’ve yet to find homes; an amazing set of noisy, post-Industrial Grime & Radiophonic Bleep captured at ADDAC in Olaias, several very nice Drone Pieces & Complex Automations recorded on the Synthi 100 at Knobs in Vancouver, and even an un-apologetically melodic set of scattered poly-rhythmic Machine Music recorded right here within the the last week.

Demand.

I've recently set up a YouTube™ Channel, as there had been an embarrassment of recorded music from the past few years in raw, unexpurgated states, mixed-down & mastered, essentially languishing on hard drives in the garage & my resolve to conjure up homes for it all has been failing as of recent. That & it's mid-late 2018 & I'm feeling somewhat apathetic towards the idea of spending every waking moment of the next year+ assessing & massaging all of it into a series of commercial goods, so I've taken the high road & have begun uploading live sets, studio materials, artist talks & workshops, and more, all with accompanying videos. This feels a diplomatic way to both share & handle such a volume of work: a public airing, on demand. Please Subscribe, if you're at all inclined.

There are Playlists for Redactions, Generators, Playthroughs, and one called Asides for pieces that fall outside of any of the recent performance/recording solutions (such as this one, of which I'm rather fond; it's as if Esplendor Geometrico, Lego Feet, & This Heat's "24 Track Loop" started a wine-cultivating commune in the Alsace region) :

Note that I'm certainly not opposed to any of this being issued commercially, so please Get In Touch if you have any ideas on the matter, especially if they involve collaborating on the editing & assembly stages of any one piece or concept; both processes I feel that I'm well & truly past my prime & patience-reserves in attempting in a critical way. The performances & sessions audible above appear in their complete states, as they were captured, with all real-time decisions & situational artifacts left intact; they could use some pruning, for sure...

Asia, Europe, North America; Autumn 2018.

After a 10-month hiatus from performing (outside of my immediate neighborhood in Melbourne) I will return to the world's stage in late September, with festival appearances & solo engagements confirmed in Japan, Switzerland, Hungary, the USA, & Canada - then a 2 week pause, followed by - Portugal, Spain, & France.

If you are interested in hosting a performance of a "Redaction", a "Generator", or even a "Playthrough" in either stereo or in a multi-channel array, please get in touch via the "Email" tab on this site; there are a handful of availabilities still in the late September / early October leg, as well as the late October / early November one. Consider that the cost & risk of flying from another hemisphere to perform a one-off will be greatly reduced; safety in numbers. 

Update: this was, by all reports, a successful and rewarding run of concerts, workshops, and residencies; See+Hear documentation below!

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More clips from @semibreve coming in

A post shared by Keith Fullerton Whitman (@keithfullertonwhitman) on Nov 4, 2018 at 10:25pm PST

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Sound & Light check w/ @piercewarnecke @semibreve

A post shared by Keith Fullerton Whitman (@keithfullertonwhitman) on Oct 28, 2018 at 12:44pm PDT