StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Shaping sound with Keith Fullerton Whitman

This week, let's examine some footage of electronic musician Keith Fullerton Whitman, who will be in St. Louis to perform at 7:30 p.m. next Saturday, November 12 at White Flag Projects, 4568 Manchester Ave, in a concert presented by New Music Circle. (Whitman also will lead an electronic music workshop at 1:30 p.m. Saturday afternoon at Luminary Center for the Arts, 4900 Reber Place.)

Whitman, 38, was born in Somerville, Massachusetts and attended Berklee College of Music in Boston. When he began recording in the mid-1990s, he released music and performed using a variety of aliases, such as Hrvatski, ASCIII and Anonymous, and then in 2001 began using his real name for most projects. Whitman also has been a member of bands including El-Ron, The Liver Sadness, Sheket/Trabant, The Finger Lakes and Gai/Jin.

Depending on the specific project, his music has been identified with different genres of electronic music, including intelligent dance music (IDM), drill and bass, and ambient. Much of the recent live material available via online videos would seem to fit into the latter category, with textures, patterns and sonic palettes changing and evolving via a gradual flow. Today's clips offer several examples of this, as realized live by Whitman with a MacBook laptop running MAX-MSP and/or Logic Pro software, various analog synth modules and circuit-bent gear, plus what looks to be some outboard signal processing and mixing.

The first clip up above and the one down below are from a Whitman performance in September 2010 at the High Zero Festival in Baltimore. Below that, you can see a half-hour excerpt from a concert earlier this year at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, NY. This clip was shot from behind the performer, and so there are some closeups of his hands, the computer screen, and so on, that help shed some additional light on a performance that isn't especially visual.

Below that, there are two clips that together offer about 16 minutes from Whitman's set at Hopscotch 2010 in Raleigh NC. The sixth and final clip is from his appearance in June here in St. Louis at Floating Laboratories' "Float Your Face" festival.

For more about Keith Fullerton Whitman, check out this interview he did in 2006 with Pitchfork, this interview for the website Tiny Mix Tapes, and this one for Adequacy.net.