Hrvatski: IDM and beyond

Keith Fullerton Whitman, aka Hrvatski, is a record buying addict who blends experimental drum 'n' bass, academic music and his washer and dryer into some very exciting and listenable music. I was first introduced to Keith's music when I borrowed Oiseaux 96- 98 from a friend. I had heard about Hrvatski prior to hearing the record and had expected something with far less live instrumentation. I thought it would be more like Kid606 or Matmos records than old Pink Floyd albums mixed with complex drum 'n' bass beats. I bought my own copy of Oiseaux 96-98 a few days later and listened to it over and over. Then I started lending my copy to friends who normally listen to "rock" music like Shellac or My Bloody Valentine [ Tape Op #26 ]. They too went out and bought a copy to listen to over and over. More than 2 years has gone by since then and I still think of Oiseaux 96-98 as one of the best experimental electronic records that "rock" type people can enjoy. Keith has a wide range of material from spastic cut-up drum 'n' bass rhythms to electro-acoustic drones and has had songs and records released on Planet- Mu, Kranky and on his own Reckankreuzungs- klankewerkzeuge (RKK) label (to mention a few). This combination could only be expected from someone who used to write "The Metal Detector" for Guitar World magazine, studied at Berklee College of Music and worked as an employee of Forced Exposure.

First off, I want to just talk about Oiseaux now that it's been a few years since its release. The album has been very influential to many people in the IDM [Intelligent Dance Music] scene. I just wanted to get a few words on how you feel about it today.

Well, I still like those pieces, and I'm pretty proud of them. I feel like some of the productions I dated poorly, obviously, like my overuse of drum breaks. Especially the "Amen". It was a great idea at the time because all I wanted to do was listen to tracks with the "Amen" break in them.* And, a year later I completely changed my mind and got so sick of it. I still like the music. I liked the way everything worked together. It's really kind of magical, I didn't use any pitch or time correction at all... at all! Everything that fits together is just a complete happy accident. It's just loops, that when put in a sampler and sped up or sped down that way, completely lock in speed and key. Some of those tracks, like on "Ghatham", there were 6 or 7 different samples that just happened to be completely in time with each other and completely in key with each other. And they're all from different songs, and they're all from different kinds of music. It's kind of amazing that it happened to work out. Some of it is less of an accident, I had a nice sample and I played other instruments to it.

On other songs like "Routine Exercise" there's this brass orchestra, were those samples from other pieces?

That's actually a piece by this composer named Alois Haba who's a contemporary of Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly. He traveled around Hungary and Transylvania in the early 20th century, making field recordings of folk music. He wrote a lot of music as well. Mainly the stuff that I'm interested in of his is his quartertone stuff. He wrote quartertone trombone quintets, and quartertone brass quartets and tons of quartertone piano pieces that are really interesting... a lot of the same quartertone stuff that Ives was doing, but has this neat Eastern swing to it. Kinda like weird tonalities, because he's using this kind of in-between-the-keys kind of notes, but kind of making this exotic music. That brass quartet specifically, I sampled the entire piece. It's 45 seconds long. It's only 8 bars.

And you just looped it in various ways?

Yeah, I just put it in the sampler and moved it around a bit so that it would fit. I think it's just called "Quartertone Brass Quartet" or something like that. But it's the whole piece. I got the score and I wanted to try and record it because there hadn't been a recording of it. And it was literally like, I was working on music, and then I walked into Tower [Records], and found the Complete Works of Alois Haba on a triple CD. I just freaked out. I bought it, went home and I made the track that day. It was this bad recording from the '70s. I did clean that one up a little bit. I ran it through some plug-ins like Finalator or something to synthesize some high-end because it was really dull. I used it straight out of the computer into the sampler and just worked from there.

Were there any other recordings of composers you had used or made for Oiseaux?

Yeah there's some. I mean that track "Atelier", the main hook is actually from a tribute LP of George Maciunas, who is the main Fluxus guy. It's this groovy track in the middle of the Fluxus tribute LP, so I sampled it. I thought it was interesting. And, also some of the slow piano. Not much else, but I kinda had that idea when I first started. I wanted to make all these tracks and sample 20th Century classical music. Just because it's a lot of what I listened to and I thought it would be a neat and subversive thing to do. To get kids to kind of have that vocabulary in their head. To know John Cage prepared piano music by hearing it in a drum and bass track. That was what the whole Hrvatski thing was.

How do you feel now, when you hear reviews, or people spouting in- fluences or similarities in under- ground D'n'B zines and IDM lists and they speak about you?

Its weird. I did it almost completely like this fuck off [project]... I just wanted to make it this complete exercise in subversion. I just wanted to construct poppy tracks out of avant-garde samples. That was my idea. But it's completely not that. I started getting into drum 'n' bass and programming, next minute I really like the music. So I couldn't be so sarcastic about it. I just began making tracks because I liked making tracks. Until I made those tracks, I wasn't ever into dance music. Then it was like [in a boomy, authoritative voice], "Ha haa! We'll teach those kids a lesson! Those crazy dance music kids! This will show 'em!" And I just got into dance music. It's weird, the influence thing, I occasionally still get emails from kids who just find the record. It's out of print now, and has been for about six months.

And then breaking away from Oiseaux, came the Raume 7"

Well yeah, it's curing that disease, so to speak. That's another thing — it was pure. I wanted to make tracks of just a specific room of my house. Going with a microphone and getting every sound out of a particular room. Not changing anything, not bringing anything in to either room. Just going into the kitchen and going, "Okay, what in the kitchen, as it is right now, makes sound?" The microwave, the pots and pans, the sink, the hum of the refrigerator, that kind of thing. Dropping a chair on the floor. I'm still working on a lot of that stuff. The three tracks came out as a 7" and there is another 7" coming out, that's the washer and the dryer in the basement. One track's just washer sounds and one track's just dryer sounds.

And you just cut them up and pitch them?

That's it. No DSP. It's literally just building kits in the sampler. The only processing I'll ever do is stereo. Everything in the kit is mono samples. I do all the recordings in mono then actually build it so that things fall into a stereo spectrum. Then, maybe pitch shift things up and down a bit. I am using a filter in the Akai, but no actual computer for processing — running it through processes on a computer, normalizing things, none of that. Just editing the sounds, building it in the sampler and mixing it through an analog mixer.

Talking about Planet-Mu, you have a full length coming out.

There's this full length, Swarming & Dither. It's all the stuff I've been playing live for the last two years. It's what I've done since Oiseaux and a lot of those tracks are from around the time of Oiseaux. It's crazy! Tracks I recorded in '97 are coming out on an album in 2002! Everybody has this opinion of electronic music being completely a flash in the pan and nothing's good a week after it's released. I think it's kinda cool that I can at least make something that sounds good 6 years later. There's one track that is kind of a 200bpm real blasted kind of gabber track that's all fast beats. I think it's an awesome track. It doesn't really fit on the album, but I made a point of putting it on there anyway. Because I thought, well, it's a track that I'm proud of, I like it. And it's going to have no other way of being released. With the Raumes stuff, I'll finish it one of these days. I have only three or four rooms left in my house. Then I'll do the hallways and the porches or something. And then I'll be done. That will also be a full length on Planet-Mu. It'll be nice. I like that approach. I was going to do that stuff under a different name, but Wolfgang (of tonschacht) who originally released the tonschacht 7" was like, "You should just do it as Hrvatski, you shouldn't make up some weird name." He was political about it. And as the label owner he is concerned that it is going to sell copies. Rather than I put it out as Alfred Bizzarro or whatever I was going to use [laughs]... I was going to kill off Hrvatski after Oiseaux.

So you just wanted Hrvatski to be like this one "Amen" break record?

One record. Just one thing and then just die.

You have also hooked up with Kranky records right? Is that release out yet?

Released in late October 2002.

That is a complete departure from what you had been doing previously, more guitar/DSP based stuff, correct?

Yeah. It's not that I have temporary feelings about music. I just like a lot of different things. I'm a music junkie. I'm like your classic guy who walks into a record store and out of any 10 records he can find one that's interesting. That's always the way I've been. I love that sort of hard, cut-up breakbeat music. But god, I never listen to any of that stuff other than when I'm making it. The stuff I listen to is a little world music, contemporary classical, a lot of art music. I listen to a lot of completely beatless ambient. Not even like ambient. It's much more tonal stuff. Sound research. I like to use that term. Even '70s krautrock type stuff, up to people that are doing contemporary DSP type stuff. I'm into computers and all that, so I think it's a logical step. I started doing these guitar concerts in like '99, when Invisible Cities was happening in New York. Invisible Cities was *[a performance where] every week somebody different was curating it. Kurt Ralske did his and he wanted me to come and play guitar duos with no computers at all. Kurt used to be in the Ultra Vivid Scene, a 4AD band. And I was a huge fan of his guitar stuff. So when he asked me to do this, "Yeah, we'll just bring acoustic guitars, electric guitars, and just play." Then, he got this idea, because he's into MAX and doing computer processing of guitars. So I started working on it more as well, and turned into basically the 21:30 EP, on Apartment B. I played those pieces live and recorded them the next week. That's what came out on the EP. It's basically just running pure guitar sounds through all sorts of either VST plug-ins or MSP type stuff. Like reconstruction type modules.

So is the MSP stuff automating itself as you play?

Exactly. It has [all sorts of connections] that slowly fade parameters in VST plug-ins and slowly fade things in and out. And use some FFT-based filters on some frequencies.

And so, as you play do you listen to what the effects are doing and then play to it?

Exactly. Actually there's very little playing. I'm playing a note, I have a foot pedal connected to my guitar. I fade a note in and the first thing it does is convert the signal to a sine wave. Just removes all guitar. It takes the root note and sends a sine wave according to the volume I'm playing. That goes through a whole series of tape delay simulators, like a four head tape delay. It's got four actual delays. The first one's two seconds, the second one is slightly less than 2 seconds, and the third one is slightly less than that one. So that if you play a percussive hit, you get [claps his hands once] on the first hit and then you get four close together hits. As it dissipates they get farther and farther apart. It sounds cool with just percussion, but if you play a slow fade you get this phase thing where it starts to move around in the stereo field and spread apart. In a way it's starting to cancel each other out. That's actually nice and I have it set on almost infinite repeat. That's where you get this 99% feedback. When you play, you fade in a note, and the next time it repeats the attack is completely gone. Then it's just this one note, slowly moving out in the stereo field and crossing over itself. That whole thing was like Terry Riley, the time-lag accumulator, who would be playing saxophone through this 8-second tape loop. It was constantly overdubbing on itself, and then the more he recorded the older [riffs], the more it would erase. Then there's stuff that stays there, and he would write over it at different frequencies and the clash would cancel each other out.

Have you ever seen any of Robert Fripp's performances with Frippertronics?

I remember I always had Frippertronics bootlegs when I was a kid, and I liked him. I also thought he was a little too tweedy though. He'd kinda keep it very melodic, sweep it up, and then he would have this giant arpeggio. I mean, it's cool, I like Fripp a lot, don't get me wrong. I wanted to do something that was more obsessed with really subtle tonality. Just a root and a 5th. Then boom, there's your chord. Then just subtly fading in a 9th so you get this neat overtone and the overtones of the 9th going against the root. When they spread out, you get even more overtones that spread out. That's more my thing, Fripp's more melodic, where [mine] is more like building this giant cloud.

So you decided to release this under Keith Fullerton Whitman...

Ever since my school days, I wanted to do more academic stuff under my own name. I kinda reserved my name for that. I recorded 21:30 for acoustic guitar in '99 and it came out in May of 2001. In between then, I listened to it almost every night before I went to sleep, every night I was home, I put on those two tracks. I said to myself, "You know, these are nice." It took me two years to make copies of it and give it to my friends and tell them, "Here you go, here is a copy of this thing that I listen to all the time. It's not breakbeat excess — it's not really rhythmic. It's just nice tonality. Nice sound. A constant sound that lulls me to sleep." And then Danny from Lucky Kitchen and Daniel Wyatt released it. They were adamant about it being released in big edition rather than just 25 copies that I give to my friends. I'm glad they talked me into it in retrospect. The first week it was released I was holding a copy in my hands thinking, "Oohhh... People are going to think I'm so pretentious. I've been doing all this breakbeat stuff and then releasing this very abstract listenable thing." But people were cool about it. People got mad that I used my name. A couple people were asking, "Well, what's this all about?"

I was just wondering what people thought about it after they picked this up, when they were practically expecting another "Amen" crazy breakbeat record.

Which is exactly why I released it this way. I'm protecting you... I'm trying to say, "This is not like that, this is not Hrvatski." The first record I released was that Attention Cats record where every track was a different artist, but they're all me. I tell people that they are not me, but I did all those tracks. I figured people would get it after awhile. I have a lot of different aliases and I make a lot of different music, but not all of them are electronic. Not all of them are crazy beat music. Which is why I'd always been so keen to kill off Hrvatski. Okay I did that one thing, it got popular, done. There's no point in furthering it. Recently I've had a change of heart and I've been doing more crazy beat stuff.

I wanted to talk a bit about your recording techniques and equipment. First I'd like to talk about your software. When we last talked you were telling me you were using Logic and Vision a lot. Now that Vision is a product of a defunct company, what are you into nowadays?

Actually I found a way to keep Vision alive on OS9 — there is a weird third party patch you can use. I'm still using it for MIDI. Anything that I use in the sampler itself, I still program in Vision. I do individual programmed parts. I'll build a kit in the sampler, I sequence it in Vision. I have two computers setup, one's an old G3 Beige, and then I have a new Dual Processor G4. So I run MIDI on the Beige G3, digital out of the sampler into the new Mac, into an Audiowerk 8 card running into Logic. Just to have all the programmed chunks. I'll program the drums and then sync it up with some live instruments. Other than the drums, pretty much nothing else is programmed MIDI. I do a lot of VST plug-in automation, drawing [automation] in Logic. Tons of it, just about every possible parameter. Greg Davis built this amazing Pluggo plug-in called Evolver that lets you randomize VST plug-ins and do ramps between all the random values. So if you want to fade from one random value to the next, and it completely morphs over 5 seconds, you can sync it up with your host. I've been using that a lot. I like using the Pluggo stuff where you can control it by having it listen to the audio. There's this one that is an envelope follower where the amplitude information is any VST plug-in parameter. So you can envelop any VST plug- in in Pluggo. I'll have it controlling the cutoff frequency in D-Pole or something. I'm doing a lot of that kind of stuff which goes against the typical school of using an envelope on a VST plug-in where you get some cool setting, and you just use it the entire tune which is getting rather stale at this point. As technology progresses I have more control over that kind of stuff. Making it change through time and having it evolve. That's the direction that all this digital stuff is going. Nobody is happy with just a cool sound. A drum break run just through a sonic decimator doesn't cut it anymore. You have to do a little more than that, you have to make it somehow change through time.

About the time when you said you were getting sick of doing the "Amen" break, you started doing more field recording. Tell us a bit about the gear you've been using. I remember the last time we met you showed me those ear bud concealed mics, the ones that look like headphones.

The Soundman OKMs. Those are great... Unfortunately, I completely lost them. That's the problem. They're so tiny. Now I use a Sony MS-957 stereo mic, which is like their consumer flagship mic, which is fine. That's what I bring with me.

Do you still record onto MiniDisc?

Yeah. I got a new MiniDisc when I was in Australia and it has a newer version of ATRAC compression in it. I think it sounds a lot better than my old one. I had an old Sony and I bought a newer Sony, the MZ- R700, that sounds 10 times better, plus it has long play mode, long record mode where you can fit 6 hours on a MiniDisc. And then for recording things in the house, I use two Joe Meek VC3Qs and two Octavas. Although, I just got an AKG-414C that was given to me by a friend. So now I use the Octava 319 and the AKG and the sound is like apples and oranges. You get great weird stereo. Sometimes I would record drums with two mics over a drum set. Then use the compression in the Meek because it's this nice sorta weird compression. You get some really fat old drum sounds. I've been doing a lot more of that stuff. Recording actual live drums and things.

Do you use any outboard gear?

These days, pretty much no, other than mics. Everything's recorded back to Pro Tools or live to DAT and then I do everything internally. I've never been into synths as my thing, actual analog synths or even MIDI synths. I don't like the idea of synths for some reason. If I want a particular part, I'll play it. I play a lot of different instruments so I'll actually play an organ or whatever. Especially since the last six months I've been getting back to basics and actually acquiring Rhodes piano sounds and things like that. Using those timbres, which I think are so much more warm and inviting than the newest digital synth. Digital analog modeling and that kind of stuff has a lot of promise, but I've never been that interested for some reason.

So you've been more into sound manipulation.

Yeah, sound manipulation is key for me. Obviously, you can do a lot with digital audio. I'll get a sound as close to what I want. I'll record a Rhodes piano part, and then I have all these things I can do in digital. I can correct the time. I can correct the timbre and I can run it through a myriad of processes. Anything that you can conceive of these days with audio, you can do. Not just using VST plug-ins, but building things in MAX. There are a lot of great 3rd party objects in MAX that will let you do just about anything you want. That's fun. I get more into the processing end of things as composition than the actual writing sometimes. Electronic music is an interesting paradigm where you can come up with a tune, play your parts and you record it in Pro Tools with live instruments. That's a rock band track. The second you start getting into the creative DSP stuff, it's a whole other world. Like I said, I spend 10 times more on the processing than on the track itself. I like really simple parts — I like a lot of space. You can fill in that space as much as you want with digital smear. I use it to make the recording sound fuller. Not just compression, but using tiny delays and spectral effects and things to stretch it out.

That seems to be one of the problems these days with all this advanced DSP software and hardware available, you find that as you're recording you're spending more time on the DSP modeling than on the actual recording.

That is a problem. I find MAX really intuitive though. My learning curve is short. The downtime I spend coding is minimal compared to building a sequence of VST plug-ins in Logic that will get the order that I want or building something in Pluggo. I find that it's more direct to use MAX/MSP and then there's the whole interactivity of building things in MAX/MSP and converting them into VST plug-ins. You can take simple patches that do one thing, make an input and make an output turn it into a VST plug-in, and then just use it in Logic. Then I can use the actual automation that I'm used to in Logic. I remember when Greg showed me how to use the Pluggo VST conversion. It's useful, because you can open up all your patches and turn them into plug-ins and just open as many instances as you want. It's optimized. I'll just go in and out, because the whole MAX interface is cumbersome.

You come from a large background of music academia, but you've pegged a notch into the independent underground world. When making music, do you follow more of what you've learned from academia or do you meander along the indie route and experiment with things?

I think the people that tend to enjoy what I do are more into indie. I like academia, I do. It interests me. I read a lot and I study a lot still. Not just history, but techniques and things. But it's refreshing in the indie world. Everything is just sound. Everything just boils into what you can represent and there's so much bullshit in academia. You come up with this great concept, this crazy rhythmic idea, but then you actually realize it with a Casio RZ-1. Then you're listening to this recording of a Casio RZ-1 playing through some crazy rhythmic figures and it's like they almost don't care about the sound. I've always been just about the sound of things. I can almost care less what theory is behind some piece of music than what the actual result is. That's how I've always been in contrast with anything academic. That's why concréte and all these things are so appealing to me. It's pure timbre music. The way that [people] have patched it together almost seems improvised. They're just presenting sounds in what they think is a logical order. I think they are sounds that they collect for themselves. They're political speeches or specific locations and your mind's just swimming the whole time you're listening to that stuff. I think it's definitely the most cerebrally challenged type of music and that's something that came completely out of academia and copious drug use. All the concréte guys were stoners and sex addicts, which you didn't hear from me. [snickering] I just like it. I'm just presenting academia in a more digestible form. That's all I ever aim to do.

*The "Amen" drum break comes from "Amen Brother" by a band called The Winstons. The sample of that break has become extremely popular for electronic music (mostly drum 'n' bass).