About Fertanish

Music – Terrible At Small Talk

Terrible At Small Talk is the most recent moniker evolved from Fertanish. The new name reflects an evolution to free experimental music, absent of vocals and blessed with a disintegration of common musical structure. Terrible At Small Talk’s first release, The Abandoned Express Doubts, is initially a composition of chaos that accepts peaceful interludes. As it continues, contentment becomes the focus while chaos is welcomed as a supportive friend to maintain balance. There are no simple descriptions of this music; it will never be praised in casual conversation. For you, I have composed an offering of contentment in music and noise.

Music – Fertanish

Fertanish is a experimental, minimalist, noise-rock music project composing songs from multiple musical instruments, electronics, and noises from our environment.

William Fertanish is from Washington D.C., a lifelong musician and visual artist. Early Fertanish songs focused on the full sound of acoustic 12-string guitars, hammering on the strings to create pounding reverberations that created a wall of sound without the aid of distortion effects. From that foundation, Fertanish began creating complex compositions of samples, noise, and instrumental music with looping rhythms, heavy beats, and experimental sounds.

In 2011, the first release from Fertanish, Zero Zero Three, debuted eleven tracks creating a journey from the harsh sounding D.C. landscape to the intricate samples of nature that surround the constant mania with beauty. In 2012, Contemplating Silent Wishes presented a methodical composition building from a minimal, hypnotic collection of subtle sounds to a climax of sensational waves.

Composition for WTW8800YW0, is a recording of sounds made while replacing a bearing on a washing machine: “when I took on a labor-intensive repair job, I decided to record every noise I made for eventual use in this song. This was remarkably peaceful, knowing that every harsh sound would eventually be turned into something wonderful.”

Can’t See The War For The Dancers is Fertanish’s first physical release since 2013. Many of the tracks on this album have evolved over four or more years – composed, shelved, visited, paused, revisited, polished, deconstructed, and then, suffocating in the smog of our year 2020, revived and mastered into an interconnected journey of reflection, chaos, and grace. Each track is diligently composed, yet contains an emotional rawness, making it the most challenging Fertanish release to date.

Fertanish releases are available on both CD and Digital Download. They are distributed by his self-promoting label, Plus Noise.

Visual Arts

William Fertanish is a visual artist who focuses on extracting items and creatures of our world and magnifying them to expose their beauty and uniqueness.

Beginning in 2014, William began Meditations on Ice and Plastic, a tedious effort to capture many views exposing the complexity of one of nature’s simplest actions: melting ice. Combining different shapes and sizes of frozen water with various formations of plastic, a series of over 60 time-lapse photography videos were created, each presenting a different view of the same chemical process. With an eerie, ambient soundtrack by Fertanish, created solely from playing wine glasses with a violin bow, Meditations on Ice and Plastic is an atmospheric journey through the calmness and chaos of nature.

In 2015, William began a series of prints entitled Dancers, consisting of painstaking “temporary” sculptures of plastic formed into ballet poses. Each print captures the wonderful formations of bodily motions, accentuated by the random media of tiny, shaved plastic pieces.

For over a dozen years, William has produced a growing series of macro photographs, highlighting the brilliant colors and fascinating structure of arthropods. With a careful eye for detail and determination to capture creatures in a natural setting, Bill transforms insects and spiders, that often generate negative feelings, into beautiful works of art.

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