duggup

Jools is currently hard at work on another project so I get to do today’s piece. And we are going to talk about guitars and a guitarist by the name of Rhys Chatham and the recently re-released “Guitar Trio“.
It comes in at around eight minutes long, and helped to establish Chatham’s manifesto of bringing punk’s intensity to avant-minimalism (or possibly that was the other way round). What you do is layer guitars on guitars and creating a hypnotic one-chord symphony/cacophony with rock solid drums and bass to give the the music it’s base to work from.

Granted this another one form the “hard listening” list but I think that even a casual listener can get something form this work. Head over to the MySpace site at http://www.myspace.com/rhyschatham and have a listen. The basic idea (as I see it) is that reducing it to the sound’s basic essence, normally hidden nuances begin to appear and these build and and grow and create something unplanned and chaotic. Everytime the piece is played it will be different.

Here is a cilp from Youtube…

After a number of years as a concert producer, I got tired of producing other people’s music. I had heard an early concert of the Ramones and was inspired by it, so I picked up electric guitar and made a composition called GUITAR TRIO in 1976/77 which combined the minimalist tendencies within which I had been working with a rock instrumentation and musicians.After working with 3 electric guitars, I upped the number to 6, and finally in 1989 to 100 electric guitars with a piece called AN ANGEL MOVES TOO FAST TO SEE, which I have been touring around the world with ever since. It was composed in France, where I had moved to that year. So I have been touring with an orchestra of 100 electric guitars for over 17 years now.

You will have to work a bit but it’s worth it… recommended