Mad enough to call his own record label Reckankreuzungsklankewerkzeuge,
shorten to RKK, Keith Fullerton Whitman remained, until
recently, relatively quite on the recording front. Following
a first album, Oiseaux 1996-1998, released
at the end of 1999, which ended up ninth in the seminal
end-of-year review of The Wire in the electronic category,
comes this second, chaotic, opus. A former metal columnist
for Guitar Player and copyist for Boston-based record
shop Forced Exposure, this Cambridge, MA, based musician
has been recording for over a decade, but very few tracks
saw the light of day until some well intentioned person
at RKK finally decided to collect some of his work on
Oiseaux.
Compiling some of Whitman’s work recorded between
1999 and 2002, the fucked-up selection of tracks that
is Swarm & Dither finds its natural home
with Mike Paradinas’s
excellent Planet Mu label. The album combines some of
the many aspects of Whitman’s decidedly tortured
music. Manic percussions slicing through romantic piano
pieces, traditional drill’n’bass structures
colliding with noise terrorism, deconstructed melodies
disappearing under tormented soundscapes, Whitman creates
mayhem with each one of his compositions, leaving the
listener puzzled by the unpredictable changes of directions.
Yet, surprisingly, he remains entirely focused from
start to finish. From the schizophrenic electro-Gameboy
on Marbles and the electro-acoustic foundations
of Echoes to the slaughtered version of the
Rolling Stones’ Paint It Black and the
heavy metal contortions of EWC4 or the psychedelic
guitar-rock Tegenborg, Swarm & Dither never
settles anywhere as Hrvatski introduces elements of
calm when you least expect them, then turns the machines
on again when you start getting comfortable.
The album also features the much sought after remix
of Kid606’s Vatstep DSP, which allegedly
only contains a couple of samples from the original.
The track kicks off the album in style, almost acting
as a showcase for the rest of Swarm & Dither.
A well-respected musician and producer, Keith Fullerton
Whitman manages to present one hell of a piece of recording
with this album. True to his roots, yet pushing the
boundaries in countless directions, Swarm &
Dither cannot but generate reactions. The fans
will surely know to expect anything but the expected,
and the new comers will equally get lost in this maze
of defragmented pieces. And you know what? Whitman doesn't
give a fuck!
3.8/5
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