Keith Fullerton Whitman adds 12-hour collection of pop deformations to SoundCloud; corporate America grinds to a halt as thousands of workers call in sick

Who knew all it would take to bring capitalism to its knees was 12 hours of new music from Keith Fullerton Whitman all at once? I don’t know about your neighborhood, but outside my window I can see two abandoned semi-trucks, several small fires, and an Arby’s in the process of being looted. All of this happened because apparently everyone called in sick today so they could listen to all 12 hours of Whitman’s Greatest Hits. With everyone at home faking coughs, industry just kind of… stopped.

Whitman, as opposed to literally every other human in the country, never calls in sick and is also possibly a machine (maybe a Voight-Kampff one, eh? eh?). He says he started working on these tracks back around 2003 when he began taking bits and pieces of pop songs from his youth and running them through a variety of processes and effects, making what he calls “automatic enhancements,” which sounds both awesome and an awful lot like a CSI: Miami joke. You can find the first 100 tracks on Whitman’s SoundCloud now. He says making them was a sort of therapy over the years, and that he feels the end results shine “a flashlight into the dark corners of each selection, revealing the ghosts lurking within,” the ghost part of which sounds pretty scary to me given the fact the electrical grid is clearly on its way out here and it’s getting dark now. Check out some of the songs over at the Chocolate Grinder.

Hopefully your experience of hearing these tracks in our new era is pleasant and not at all post-apocalyptic. For what it’s worth, though the tracks seem to sound uniformly excellent and the Arby’s near my house is still closed, so this whole “post-capitalist” thing has been kind of a mixed bag for me so far.

• Keith Fullerton Whitman: http://www.keithfullertonwhitman.com

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