While this album is perhaps a great technical achievement for Whitman, it's not really his best music. Whitman was a guest lecturer at Harvard, and that relationship gave him access to Harvard's extensive collective of vintage synthesizers, a few of which appear on this album. As the name and cover art imply, the album is a study on how to compose music for many instances of the same instrument. And, not surprisingly, the music heads more into the realm of classical composers like Steve Reich and away from electronica and pop.
The first four such experiments take this idea too far, and come off as technical exercises. Three of the four use one of his Harvard library finds - the Serge Modular Prototype - using 6 of them at a time. The songs come off as spacey and sometimes grating. Considering the wealth of software out there which does the same sort of waveform generating, using some old analog knob-twiddling to do the same thing doesn't impress me much, and the music is really just squiggly and annoying with no discernable emotion or direction. The other song that comes off more as a technical exercise is "Stereo Music for Hi-Hat (6)," which is just that, creating quiet, highly repetitive micro-drones from the cymbals.
The other four songs are more like, well, songs, and use a variety of instruments to more fully flesh out the sound. However, the sheer number of instruments used in this Multiples project doesn't really add to the impact of the songs. The first is "Stereo Music for Yamaha Disklavier Prototype (5), Electric Guitar and Computer (3)." The Disklavier is essentially just an upright piano with a plug on the side to connect directly to your computer. It's an exciting idea, but the result on this album doesn't really take the idea and run. The result is a minimal, Phillip Glass-like soundtrack piece with the same one bar repeated over and over, with background waves of guitar sound setting the tone. Five Disklaviers were used (or maybe one was used 5 times), but you don't really get a sense of that kind of depth. Speaking of depth, the feeling I get from the next song is very similar. It uses eighteen, yes 18, farfisas, but sounds like the American Analog Set eschewing pop for Mozart. One may say "who else in modern music would approach that," and that's entirely valid. However, if the idea is to see how 18 farfisas sound, why does it sound like it could have come from one for most of the song? The last two minutes adds more layering, but these layers don't really match well; they seem like they're all using the same few chords, the mismatched tempos causing them to compete and clash with each other.
The last two tracks on the album center on 8 acoustic guitars, 2 Buchla Music Boxes, and 3 Hewlett Packard oscillators, and both parts of this composition work well. The first part is mostly just the guitars, and here the multiple instances blend well, creating a gentle stream of intertwined six-string picking. Even though the guitars drop out in the second part, the repetitions from the various waveform generators great a pleasing bed of pulses that eventually blisses out into cloud of tone. There's only three noticeable waveforms, for the most part, but they match very well.
The whole album is interesting, for sure, but only certain moments make for good music. While much of what I said above is in a negative tone, the Glass-like use of the Disklavier is breathtaking, and the folky acoustic guitars in the next-to-last track are very pleasant and soothing. However, those expecting something out of the ordinary may be disappointed.
