Side A is Debussy’s La Mer played on sawtoothed (maybe snaggletoothed) electronics. Keith Fullerton Whitman’s latest Buchla synth missive, “101105,” comes with health warnings embedded; a strobe in sound rather than light, sending the audience (this was recorded live) into dead spasms. There’s rumours that a good few of the audience were high on LSD when he played this out. Let’s hope not, eh? It’s not as… breezy as some of Keith’s recent works, not as obviously de-tangling (insert here quote about Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic structures, strangling the life out of the roots from tree of knowledge) and instead reminds me in form of Faust’s “Krautrock” opener from Faust IV, if less smooth than that suggests and less solipsistic. It’s a symphonic roar of a track which gets to crescendo early on and doesn’t really give up until the end. Despite being built from edits, it’s propulsive and you’ll never hear the joins; you can just about imagine Keith holding on to this track like it’s an aircraft engine, hoping to hell he doesn’t slip on one loose wire and get thrown off.
Alien Radio responds to this long, dense frightener with shorter, smaller tracks. Ping pong bleats, electronic White Noise gulps (gulps seem everywhere at the moment in electronic music; everyone’s finding things difficult to swallow it seems) that shift ever so slightly in and out of focus (this could be my ears) and then slope off behind the sheds for a robot smoke. He seems a little intimidated, anthropomorphically spinning into a sort of jester role to Keith Fullerton Whitman’s angry Bear King. They are pleasant and mildly diverting with all the plusses and minuses that come from that shallow-arsed phrase, sounding not unlike the collaboration between Aphex Twin and Mike Paradinas (as Mike and Rich) on Expert Knob Twiddlers. You’ll like both sides, I think but I reckon you’ll return to Keith’s side more often, if just to check that he’s still clinging on.-Loki-
