As can be expected from any release on Bill Kouligas' PAN imprint, Piteous Gate — the debut full-length from Berlin-based producer James Whipple — completely obliterates and re-constructs what can be expected from an electronic music release.
With Piteous Gate, you hear an artist becoming strong to themselves, not as a strong icon or representation, but as a capable force across industrialized identities, one who extracts dances from the cosmos.
Piteous Gate focuses on questions of perception: What does it feel like to be alive in a digital age, overloaded and confused, but excited, too? What perspectives are possible now? Piteous Gate is a captivating attempt at putting those feelings into sound.
Piteous Gate is a porous, sensual record, revealing and alluring in ways that other albums aren’t.
Piteous Gate is a gripping, suspenseful audio thriller, and along with 2015 releases by Fis, Lotic, Rabit, and Amnesia Scanner, it provides an eye-opening overview of how certain corners of the electronic music underground push club-derived sounds into confounding, challenging new directions.
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