Keith Fullerton Whitman - OHM [Redactions] (2020)

Released 5 years to the day it was recorded, this set covers the very first Redaction performed live in front of an audience, in concert at Ohm (Köpenicker Str. 70, 10179 Berlin, Germany; in the same complex as Tresor & Kraftwerk) on April 6th, 2015.

While this music was performed in Quad, recordings of only two of the four channels have survived in the interim, making this an interesting artifact: the slow, quadrature pans fade away into silence for 50% of their duty-cycles, turning what I remember as a chaotic, event-heavy performance into something of a ghost-town (apropos to what is currently going on outside my door in Brooklyn, NY as I type this) with plenty of pregnant pauses.

In addition to the concert recording, I'm also including a series of stereo takes made on March 28th & 29th, 2015 in Cambridge, MA just prior; essentially "Rehearsals" for the performance itself, sections of which were seeded with recordings of Cage's music, then used edited into the "Redaction" which appeared on both the "A Simple Procedure" 2CD & the companion lathe-cut single on Estuary, Ltd. (the "[Redactions Rehearsal] (Part #2)" section is essentially the master-take).

It's interesting to hear the performative aspects of the material remain largely unchallenged from the explicitly "Private" nature of the rehearsal recordings to the "Public" nature of the performance of same (this is a dynamic I later explored at Documenta 14 in Athens, but the seeds were very much planted here).