5 years separates Donato Wharton’s latest A White Rainbow Spanning the Dark for Serein and his last production Bodily Isolations, but little has directly changed. Wharton still uses the electric guitar as source material for creating processed works of gently – and not so gently – flickering abstraction, veering from dense Fenneszian feedback squalls through clean, spacious plucked runs. What is new is the intrusion of silence, pockets of emptiness which work to amplify the surrounding events.
Even those sections most reminiscent of Fennesz, Wharton’s work remains individual, noise existing as isolated chunks fitting within a more varied whole, spurting like gaseous jets in fits and starts. In ‘A Vast White Solitude’ it stutters against sinuous sustained guitar tones, gusts of wind and random shards of grit. ‘Ink Mountains’ leaves the guitar more naked, screeching strings and narcotic strums recalling a head-nodding Ry Cooder. With ‘In A Mute Scape’ the silences are introduced, contrasting with ringing bell tones, scratched fretboard and granular hiss, nothing of the magnitude of Taku Sugimoto but surprising nonetheless. While all these events occur without strict rhythm an order of sort is apparent, an organic development like tree branches, or rhizomes, each piece rich with mysterious possibility.
Joshua Meggitt
