19.9.13

Keith Fullerton Whitman - Greatest Hits


This is a real treat: Sound designer and synth genius Keith Fulleton Whitman has started a project where he is will upload edited and processed versions of a ton of classic pop songs over the next several months. He has already uploaded 60 tracks and they are incredibly beautiful deconstructions that seem to reveal hidden bits and pieces of each song, making them sound simultaneously familiar and mysterious, like ghosts of themselves. Really amazing stuff. 

Here is the description in his own words:

"On the eve of my 30th birthday, I began rendering "automatic" "enhancements" of the most salient points of the pop music of my youth; a line, bar, or fragment of a particular song (after being heard out in "the wild" in the present & re-triggering its memory; akin to running into an old friend on the street & staging that awkward, stilted conversation neither of you wants to have) was chosen based on how much my nostalgic recollection of it differed from its contemporary reality.
Each edit was looped at exactly half-speed, then run through a series of time- & gain-based processes that slowly and meticulously chewed through the audio, revealing hidden layers of content, context, and temporal/spectral production details … like shining a flashlight into the dark corners of each selection, exposing the hidden ghosts lurking within. Each representation here consists of a selected 3-20 minute chunk, based on the perceived "significance" unraveled via this process.
I'll be (slowly) uploading all 200 "Hits" (which should yield approx. 24 hours of music) to this Soundcloud set over the next few months/years. I know this is a cliché, but PLEASE PLAY THESE EXTREMELY LOUDLY, over GOOD SPEAKERS (subs are a MUST given the low-end emphasis; don't bother listening on your laptop or computer speakers !!! you'll miss more than half of what's going on here) ..."


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