Label: Kranky – KRANK055 Format: CD, Album Country: US Released: 21 Oct 2002 Genre: Electronic Style: Drone, Minimal, Ambient
Keith Fullerton-Whitman’s perennial classic Playthroughs.KFW’s 2002 solo debut album proper deals in heavily processed guitar tones, extracting their harmonic content and re-rendering it into an ocean of pacifying drones and dreamlike electronic fuzz.There’s certainly nothing groundbreaking about the techniques deployed, yet despite being technically underpinned by some sorta complex ’systems-driven’ logic, the whole arc is lush, unobtrusive yet totally engaging.The lingering, overlapped mishmashed tones of track3a(2waynice) pay their respects to the earlier duel sine-wave experiments explored at La Monte Young’s NYC Dreamhouse, clustered tones combining to more than the sum of their parts, whilst Feedback Zwei finds a tidal wave of soft pink noise and non-harmonic mist.Fib01a’s curdling, micro-detailing shares some DNA with the emergent glitch styles of the time, but with more emphasis on texture whilst the overlaid sustained organ tones ACGTR SVP provides the ‘heaviest’ moment on the piece, laying the foundations for the transportive 17 minute epic Modena with its gliding pita-pata rhythm and soft, hovering swells gradually coalescing into an immersive mollifying blanket.Totally understated - ambient music without the pastiche, no incense burning or mandalas in sight, and whilst there are infinite other works out there that challenge or revolutionise, in terms of exploration of tone and mood, it’s totally unmatched. (Mint / New)
