Keith Fullerton Whitman

The Graham Foundation

Madlener House
4 West Burton Place
Chicago, Illinois 60610

At long last, Keith Fullerton Whitman makes his Lampo debut. To mark the special occasion, he offers the U.S. premiere of Rhythmes Naturels, created at the legendary INA-GRM studios, plus a live modular synth improvisation.

Last October Whitman spent a week in Paris, commissioned to develop a new piece for François Bayle’s Acousmonium, an 80-speaker sound system designed in 1974 for the Groupe de Recherches Musicales. Pierre Schaeffer formed GRM, a studio and collective, in the late 1950s to encourage the development of electronic music. Members included Luc Ferrari, Iannis Xenakis, Bernard Parmegiani, among other lions; in the late 1960s Bayle became its director. For a whelp like Keith, the residency was “a life-long dream come true.” And, he says, “The piece turned out exactly as I hoped.”

Here, he’ll do his new work in a four-channel mix.

Keith Fullerton Whitman (b.1973, Bergen County, N.J.) is a composer and performer obsessed with electronic music, from its mid-century origins in Europe to its contemporary worldwide incarnation as digital music. Currently he is working towards implementing a complete system for live performance of improvised electronic music, which incorporates elements from nearly every era. He has recorded albums influenced by many genres, including ambient music, drone, drill and bass, musique concrète and krautrock. He has recorded and performed using several aliases, of which the most familiar is Hrvatski. Today most of his work is recorded under his real name. Whitman lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Presented in partnership with the Graham Foundation