Keith Fullerton Whitman
Where are you now?
Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
Where would you be ?
Actually, still here in New York playing a concert w/ Daniel Neumann & Kamran Sadeghi on Jim Toth's Jupiter system. But yes, all travel & plans for the near & distant future are on hold, indefinitely.
What have you been doing lately?
Homeschooling by day, but at nights I've taken all of this as a sign to break my hermitude and keep up with others as much as is possible; catching up with their lives & work, then starting conversations around how they're treating themselves & seeing the future.
What are you hearing right now?
I can hear my son dancing to RP Boo's "Bangin' on King Drive" upstairs & his footsteps are pounding through the floorboards sending sizzling trails of masonry dust through the floorboards into the basement here, but still mainly sirens; endless sirens. The Brooklyn Hospital Center is a few blocks away, and it's one of the centers of treatment for the virus here in the city; sonically there's been no real respite from the reality of what's happening outside our front door, only temporary avoidance via music, films, & domestic activities.
Are you taking advantage of this containment period to make music?
Absolutely; many of the minor roadblocks I tend to use to demotivate myself from finishing music work have been stripped away given the constant focus on the intensity of the outbreak. I made a choice decades ago to have music as a focal point in my activities, and even though it often feels futile, continuing to explore, build, create, conceptualize, and make music has been a real balm. I've been working on a pair of extremely well-timed commissions, and after that I will continue to work through my archives of largely unfinished & incomplete recorded music & will work towards finalizing as much of it as possible; this has also been extremely therapeutic.
How will the world be after all this?
Severely wounded, and the rebuilding of cultural infrastructure and communities around it will take decades. Spirits will remain largely undiminished; I've already been reassured about everyone's dedication to their chosen paths & how hard everyone has worked to find alternate paths away from the in-situ venues in which most of it has propagated.
How can we support the music community?
By continuing to keep everyone & their ideas in our lives, and to continue to consume and rally around art that fills a significant portion of our psyche and focus. So much of what is significant in our corner/world of music is around having shared experiences, and these are what everyone is missing the most. I've been really enjoying the various streaming performances & festivals (ESS in Chicago, for example, has been doing excellent work) but the main force of good has definitely been Bandcamp's repeated efforts to directly benefit the artists who use their platform; possibly the lone example of a late-capitalist entity willing to, even temporarily, sacrifice corporate growth for something unequivocally good for its own community. Hard to understate how helpful this has been.
Five musical recommendations ?
Udo Kasemets / George Cacioppo, "Synergetic Sonorities"
Jon Also Bennett, "Music for Save Rooms"
Lea Bertucci, "Acoustic Shadows"
Rashied Ali & Frank Lowe Duo, "Exchange: Complete Sessions"
Bookworms, "Dyslexia One & Two"
One book ?
"The Smell of Ink and Soil: The Story of (edition) Hansjörg Mayer" by Bronac Ferran
What will you do when you're out?
Continue.
Links:
www.keithfullertonwhitman.com
