Special Editions: Hrvatski / Keith Fullerton Whitman “Quickies b/w Butcher Shoppe” Split (Bennifer Editions)

Like it says on the tin, this is a little feature I’ll be posting whenever I get something special in the mail. This week, a cassette release from the inimitable Keith Fullerton Whitman!

I had to get this thing – as soon as word reached me that Massachusetts-based avant garde synth composer and all-around badass Keith Fullerton Whitman was breaking out his Hrvatski alias for a tape split with himself, there was no debating it.

If you don’t know, Hrvatski was Whitman’s “breakcore” outlet in the early-to-mid aughts, releasing work on a number of different imprints but gaining notoriety primarily for his work on the esteemed leftfield electronica label Planet Mu. Pitchfork was big into him back in the day. To call it breakcore feels a bit weird, as although Whitman displayed many touchstones of the style (the greatest of which was the meticulous manipulation of jungle drum breaks into surging, twisting, even melodic passages) it was clear that his interest was transitory (as was his residence on Planet Mu, though Mike Paradinas had the foresight to sign Venetian Snares, another artist who would eventually outgrow breakcore’s strictures). By the time he was gone, it was evident that the sound was stagnant.

Whitman hung up the Hrvatski name in 2005 (as the p4k interview indicates, he felt like breakcore was a young man’s game), and with it went his apparent interest in junglism, and pop-leaning electronica in general. He began operating solely under his own name and focusing on abstract sound, via modular synthesis in particular but also acoustic drone composition, and his output since then has been marvelous in its own way (Pitchfork certainly didn’t lose their passion for him). Still, I missed the art-pop that Whitman would allow to poke through the static and buzz of his Hrvatski tracks.

So I freaked out a bit when I learned that 5 years later, Whitman had brought back the alias for this split, though it wasn’t newly recorded material. As with a lot of Whitman’s more recent releases, the music is mostly archival – the names of the Hrvatski tracks seem to indicate the time of recording (“Quickie.2005.3.24.16.59.55”, for example) which place them around the time of the alias’ demise. The music is indicative of this as well – While earlier Hrvatski tracks often didn’t suffer for cacaphony, their rhythms were recognizable as being grounded in conventional breaks and patterns. The two split tracks recorded in 2006, by contrast, feature manic, Zach Hill-esque improvisational drum freakouts accompanied by squalling, bleeping synths (like a foley artist giving life to a mad computer). It’s essentially the sound of the Hrvatski guise disintegrating, the collapse of the star before its death. The track from 2005 is an exception – an unaccompanied minute and 43 seconds of sampled free jazz drums. It’s charming, but slight.

The B-side is a 30-minute extended piece from Whitman’s christian name, and it’s as abstract as most everything released as such – a slowly building wall of jittery modular synths, like digital gale-force winds whipping around tree branches. It’s totally alien where Hrvatski was connected to familiar sounds, even if  those connections were often tenuous.

*edit – Look like I was wrong in a few of my presumptions about this work, but right in a few ways. This is how Keith himself introduced the music:

the two sets of pieces here harken back to the tail-end of hrvatski’s time-on-earth …the first side offers a suite involving pages of html code & text(in this case hrvatski’s myspace page)converted into control-information “driving’ an automated max-msp patch that generates “automatic” “splatter” “core” music (thanks to steim for the hookup wrt a clean / clear space, both head & actual, in which to devise said) … the second features a complete hrvatski concert(to date the last & final) recorded at allston’s legendary basement venue the butcher shoppe,remixed by myself by running the volume curves through a roland space echo & a moog low-pass filter …

(Did I mention that this man is a mad fucking genius? Dude is a mad fucking genius)

The cassette is from a limited edition of 100, and comes without a case, which is kind of irritating, in a plastic envelope that also contains a pretty neat poster, with a depiction on one side of what I think is Whitman playing a keyboard in a tribal headdress of some kind, and the reverse is a sort of optical illusion / stained glass window artwork with the release information at the bottom. The Hrvatski Headdress image is now placed above the turntable in my living room – hopefully someone asks about it someday so I’ll have an opportunity to regale them with all this stuff I’m unloading on you right now. The cassette itself is embossed with a reflective sticker, which my camera flash naturally did not like.

Totally worth it. And looking it up on Mimaroglu Music (the tape-and-vinyl-centric record store that Whitman runs with his friend Geoff Mullen [a great experimentalist in his own right], which anyone with an interest in out-there music should really get to know intimately) I see that Hrvatski has done remix work for 13 & God, which, well, is not good for my wallet. Oh well!

You can find the “Quickies b/w Butcher Shoppe” split at Mimaroglu Music. You should get one before they’re all gone forever.

The backside of the poster. Weird and compelling stuff!

Displays all the info about the release, concert poster-style.

The shiny sticker masks the barely contained madness inside.