As I lay in a country bed, trying to craft a worthwhile opening paragraph, I am constantly distracted by these sounds around me. One is a squeaky ceiling fan, which cries as it slowly rotates and rocks in the slow, humid air. The other is my Grandpa snoring symphonically through the thin wood panel walls, with such a frightful gale as to suck up his own nostrils. And outside the window are the distant cries of coyotes, yelping and yapping out on the shadows of the countryside. Yet, somewhere between my ears there exists a spectacular balance to the proceedings, as my head draws and mixes them together into a satisfying musical whole. If I only had a microphone in which to save and later savor these sounds!

Apparently, Keith Fullerton Whitman feels a similarly procreant urge to capture these brief moments of life that seem to be outside of ordinary reality. In the Dartmouth Street tunnel that runs from Back Bay Station in Boston to Copley Plaza, a cavernous walkway lined with glass brick walls reflects the sounds of passengers and trains in such a way as to sound like music to his ears. We have utility doors banging, footsteps on a catwalk, some lost guitar reverberating down the walkways, the arrivals and departures of three trains, and all the percussive accompaniment of people running to make their transfers. As the piece moves on, an odd sound phenomenon begins to envelop the daily proceedings. About five minutes in, this mechanized drone of the trains disappearing down the tunnel coalesces into a heavy constant undertow of sound, swallowing up the guitar, passengers, and the approach of other trains, sustaining the snippet beyond its apparent qualities.

What separates this material from the field recordings on the old Folkways label is that the raw sound taped by Whitman is conversely used to create a new piece, almost a reflection of the original sounds which are now bent and refracted through his eyes and ears. Whitman's response piece runs nearly the same length as the centerpiece, and is remixed in real time, combining these elements along with some of the life sounds from where he was doing the remixing, on his front porch. Here, Whitman builds on the odd metallic train drone of the original with a harmonium-like resonance, washing everything out with a beautiful haze of generator buzz, becoming the thick air of the underpass itself, completely saturated in humid humming. He even lets the birds in the trees and the cars on the street make an appearance as the drone begins its gentle descent back into the everyday.

Those expecting sounds like those found on last year's polished Playthroughs won't find them here; the production on this outing has a much rougher aura. Whereas each note of Playthroughs seemed almost like a singular pearl, Dartmouth Street Underpass provides a gritty ether that sticks to the skin, as dirty in its ambiance as the subway's platforms on a muggy day. It's also important for newcomers to note that Whitman has experimented with this premise before, to more satisfying ends. His CD-R releases Car Passings at Night and Manchester-by-the-Sea similarly manipulated the sounds of cars passing on wet roads and waves crashing on a beach. Of these releases, Manchester-by-the-Sea remains the most compelling. Dartmouth is closer to Car Passings in both subject and replayability-- an interesting experiment that rewards listening, but rarely engages on a visceral level.

-Andy Beta, March 18th, 2003