Yearlong documents a series of live improvisations between
laptop mavericks Keith
Fullerton Whitman and Greg
Davis, recorded between 2001 and 2002 in a variety
of venues scattered across the US and Europe, including
art galleries, coffee shops and radio studios. Edited
down from over eighteen hours of recordings to a mere
forty-five minutes and thirteen tracks, named after
the location they were originally performed at, this
album can only give a rapid insight into the pair’s
collaborative work, but it charts some interesting territories
close to their respective experimental work.
Both Keith Fullerton
Whitman and Greg Davis
have become highly regarded musicians with their individual
projects. Whitman
first appeared at the tail end of the nineties as Hrvastky,
a moniker used to express his harder musical side, before
eventually releasing more purely experimental and varied
records under his own name. Davis’s
first releases were published while he was still studying
for his degree in composition. Exploring the connections
between electronics and acoustic instrumentations, his
first two albums, Arbor
and Curling Pond Woods,
defined a whole new set of possibilities for electronic
musicians to play with. His recent third album, Somnia,
showcased a more subdued and introspective part of Davis’s
work, bringing together some of his drone recordings
collected over the years.
Standing firmly outside of their usual sonic framework,
the structure of each of the thirteen tracks on this
album is too intricate to attribute any particular sound
or action to either Davis
or Whitman. If elements
of piano found on La Casa or chopped-up acoustic
guitars of Videogrammes Festival could come
from Greg Davis’s
sound bank, and the underlying drone found of the second
Knitting Factory recording is not that dissimilar
to some of Whitman’s
experiments, the vast majority of this sonic magma remains
the result of the pair’s remarkable connections
and their deep mutual understanding.
The constant shift of focus between tracks creates an
unsettling atmosphere throughout the record, but its
disjointed aspect is far from being accidental. Yearlong
actually works on at least two very distinct levels.
Each track is totally unique, bearing no relation to
any other, and holding no apparent strategic place within
the record. Ranging from just a minute and a half for
the track recorded at Marseille’s Videogrammes
Festival, to the WNYU-FM Radio Session, which clocks
at just over ten minutes, these thirteen improvisations
are all utterly unique. Yet, the continuous trickle
of fractured soundscapes and atmospherics found all
through this record is intrinsically emblematic of the
internal structure of each one of these tracks and contributes
to creating a gigantic sonic patchwork in which the
listeners are invited to lose themselves.
The yearlong tour undertaken by Keith
Fullerton Whitman and Greg
Davis gave them a chance to explore a variety of
soundscapes and ambiances usually found outside of their
individual reach. If Yearlong undoubtedly give a different
perspective on their respective work, it ultimately
feeds on the urgency of the live environment and, above
all, on each one of the men’s musical identity
to define something totally new and fresh.
4.6/5 |
