Keith Fullerton Whitman Quotes

I love collecting; my joy is finding private press American or European home studio electronic music from the 60s and 70s.

I think if people have more of an understanding of what I'm doing, then they'll appreciate it and get into it more.

Records can ruin you. That's why it's important to be as intimately familiar as possible with the history of recorded music, I guess. In a way, it's an argument for record collecting.

I don't want to rewrite history.

With the mailorder, I wake up in the morning, I check my e-mail, process the orders, and then I just print everything out. And then for the rest of the day it's actually sitting with paper.

I build the individual modules to meet a demand. If I need the music to change direction, I want to have the tools to be able to do that.

I see someone play, or I listen to a record, and I think, "How did they make that sound?' It's not emulation; it's more building a vocabulary that can be called up at a moment's notice.

It's funny, because I'm so associated with digital art and computer art, and yet I spend so little time in front of the computer.

The computer does things that can't be done with hardware, like freezing sounds.

I rarely assess live shows after I play them.

I can only stand to sit in front of my computer for three or four hours a day. Otherwise it can get really soul-sucking.

I use a laptop more as a tool, as sort of the central artery. Everything goes through the digital audio card of my computer, but if I had my druthers I'd do everything in dedicated hardware.

I'm not a perfectionist by a long shot, but self-doubt is a large part of my creative process.

People have a hard time going to a club and seeing this business tool on stage that's wholly indicative of everything that rock is not. Rock is not about sitting in an office setting up documents, yet they see someone on stage doing that.

I became this guy that does drum programming, and I don't want to be that guy anymore. I don't want to sit in front of my computer for 18 hours programming 16 bars of music.

I think Pro Tools is pretty analogous to how people composed music on tape back in the 70s, taking little fragments of things and saying, 'How can we organize these in a sensible way'?

I'm a real big electronic music nut; when I was young I listened to musique concrète, German music from Cologne in the early 50s, all kinds of stuff.

Unfortunately I've gotten more resistance in the last year than I ever have.

I've got a bunch of circuit-bent boxes and things that are controlled by my Mac through a big breakout box. I want to create this total environment where I can bring all this gear to the show but maybe just use one or two elements, if that's what's called for.