Keith Fullerton Whitman is a composer & musician currently based in Melbourne, Australia. Beginning in the early 90's while working towards a Bachelor's Degree in "Music Synthesis" Degree at Boston's Berklee College of Music, Keith began exploring electronic music's many facets, eventually yielding dozens of recordings for influential labels such as Kranky, Editions Mego, PAN, Planet µ, Carpark, Room40, Amethyst Sunset, Amish, NNA Tapes, No Fun Productions, Agents of Chaos, Arbor, Digitalis Limited, Ekhein, Heavy Tapes, Rare Youth, Root Strata, and many more.
These days his creative energies are largely put into the continued development of a singular take on "Live Electronic Music" incorporating an ever-changing hybrid software & hardware-based system that allows for the desired complexities of sound & vision. While this work has recently manifested itself as a pair of albums for Editions Mego entitled "Generators" & "Occlusions," it's largely intended for the stage. More recently, Keith has been performing a piece titled "Redactions," incorporating thematically & geographically relevant Musique Concrète elements into the modular setup. He is set to launch a new series of scalable, equestrian-themed digital music frameworks under the "Grid Work" banner in early 2017.
Over the past 20 years, Keith has given over 500 performances of his music - everything from solemn held-tones to pointillist reckless-abandon - at venues ranging from "Punk" basements to some of the most celebrated European & North-American festival stages such as Akousma, CTM, Dissonanze, Electronica En Abril, Impakt, Kontraste, Lanaudière, LUFF, Mutek, Novas Frequencias, Présences Électroniques, Skanu Mesz, Sonic Acts, Suoni Per Il Popolo, Terraforma, Ultrahang, Unsound, Werkleitz, ZKM, etc. In addition, he has given dozens of artist talks & history lectures at prestigious institutions including the Banff Centre, Dartmouth, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, & MIT & has taken part in Colloquia, acted as Guest Faculty, co-curated music festivals & organized concerts & film events in the Boston area & beyond.
He has collaborated both on stage & record with Oren Ambarchi, Caboladies, Rhys Chatham, Tony Conrad, Greg Davis, Frans de Waard, Deerhunter, JD Emmanuel, Lawrence English, Mark Fell, Robin Fox, David Grubbs, Glenn Jones, Michael Karoli & Malcolm Mooney (Can), Eli Keszler, Felix Kubin, Okkyung Lee, Alan Licht, Matmos, Norbert Möslang, Geoff Mullen, Benjamin Nelson, Charlemagne Palestine, Terry Riley, Joel Ryan, Jessica Rylan, Uwe Schmidt, TV Pow, Ben Vida, Nate Wooley, C. Spencer Yeh, and countless others. He is also known for performances and realizations of works by composers such as Ilhan Mimaroglu, Phill Niblock, Dick Raaijmakers and Conrad Schnitzler. He has composed for dance, and his music has been set to motion by choreographers & dance ensembles including Chantal Yzermans, Le Supplici, the Andersson Dance Company, and the NYU New Music and Dance Ensemble. He has supplied music and sound-design for several video game & "music for picture" projects, advertisements, and assorted environments, including film & audio installations.
A 2011 joint commission from Sonic Acts, Kontraste Krems, and Le Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) led to a week-long session in the fabled INA-GRM studios in Paris, during which Keith realized a life-long dream, completing an 80-channel, long-form Musique Concrète work entitled "Rythmes Naturels" utilizing many of the idiosyncratic early-electronic instruments held in the studio's archive. In 2015 he completed a second piece for the GRM's yearly "Présences Electroniques" festival.
From 2003 to 2015, he helmed a highly specialized experimental-music distribution company named "Mimaroglu Music," charged with helping labels & artists all over the world with the preparation & dispersion of their tangible music artifacts. Prior to this he was the Sales-Manager of noted New England distributor Forced Exposure, for whom he personally penned hundreds of "capsule" descriptions of catalogue new-arrivals. Since relocating to Melbourne, he has started a new venture, "Broken-Music," to pick up where Mimaroglu left off.