Keith Fullerton Whitman, on The Wire:
The recording set-up for the Generator and Generators albums
“I found a quick cheap and dirty way to make these neat little canons, little Bach-like motor rhythms, very straight, 16th note, 8th note, pulsing, beautiful sounds. It’s a very small part of the patch, it’s just like four oscillators, the slow one doing the rate of the melody and the other one doing the clocking of the melody, going through a quantiser. Simple, just a few modules. And then I play with that for a few weeks, and I’m getting good results. Detuning each oscillator so there’s static intervals in there, like static third, static fourths, octaves of course. And then I got to a set of rules within the piece the more I played with it.
“It was almost like the exploration itself dictated the piece more than I was as a composer. I was sort of thinking what kind of results can I get from just using this very simple small thing. And then I found a way to have the whole thing be in this loop where the first oscillator the pitch was being analysed, and then was controlling this whole other group of things, so it’s taking the seed from this one reciprocal thing, and then feeding it into another patch, and that got really interesting. Sort of like, this is going half the speed of that, so it’s kind of accurately tracking this, but not successfully, so you get this ghost in the machine thing, where little bits of that were just off. Or it was maybe making a bad decision guessing what that was doing, feeding like polyphonic material into a monophonic pitch shifter. You play an octave pedal and you start geting those blrlr-blrlr-blrlr kind of things? OK, this is really cool!
“And then very slowly built it from one tiny little case with just eight modules, then one suitacase, then two suitcases, and then it just got ridiculous. In one year it went from the string quartet to like the Vienna Symphonic version of it. It’s no better, it’s just gets more complicated with the same tonality. And then I had drums, I was having this kick drum every ten beats, and hi-hat every, like, 17… it was getting like prime number things, it was getting Prog. It was Pentangle turns into Genesis.”
