Altered Zones

[Photo by Estelle Hanania]

By Max Burke

Rhys Chatham: "Une chanson si vieille"

Rhys Chatham's work as a composer and musician has spanned three decades and multiple continents. In New York, in the late '70s, he turned his classical minimalist training toward punk rock, creating an early incarnation of noise music with his seminal 1977 composition, "Guitar Trio." From there, he has charted a restless artistic course, taking in jazz, electronic, and avant-garde rock. His most audacious work is 2007's A "Crimson Grail," which he scored for orchestras of hundreds of guitars, and has performed both in New York and his adopted home of Paris. Throughout his career, he has maintained a passionate interest in the most cutting-edge practitioners, leading to globe-trotting collaborations and the recruitment of younger players into his extended artistic family. I spoke with Rhys over coffee on a picture perfect Brooklyn Fall day just before his headlining matinee performance at Neon Marshmallow Festival.

AZ: You wrote a number of essays in the early '90s about your experiences in the New York downtown art rock and minimalist scene. How have audiences for your music changed since that time?

Rhys: When I wrote those essays in the '90s I was still coming from the place of a conservatory-trained composer working in a rock context. Back in the '70s and '90s, the context of where you played was what defined you. So I was very careful to insist that the music that I did was not not "rock," but I didn't call myself a rock composer because I had too much respect for the form, and that wasn't where I was coming from with a piece like "Guitar Trio." Since the '70s and '80s I've kind of loosened up. At this point in my life, I've played more in rock and jazz clubs than I have in concert halls. Things have changed since the '80s: in the '90s we had this revolution of electronica, in Europe in particular. It was instrumental music with no English-language rap on top of it, just purely music. It was very powerful, I was really swept away by that and I started playing trumpet over electronic beats and released an album with Ninja Tune [Neon, with Martin Wheeler, 1997]. Then I got back into the guitar stuff.

David Daniell and James Elliott of Antiopic Records have teamed with Thrill Jockey to curate the colossal Benefit For The Recovery In Japan, a 2-part, 64-track digital compilation featuring a good chunk of the biggest heads in fringe music around the globe, including Fennesz, Tom Carter, The Ex, Oneohtrix Point Never, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Grouper, Dirty Projectors' Nat Baldwin, Rhys Chatham, Prefuse 73, Growing, Tim Hecker, C Spencer Yeh, Sam Prekop, Mountains, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, and Jackie-O Motherfucker. The comp was produced in collaboration with Bettina Richards of Thrill Jockey and Regina Greene of Front Porch Productions, and mastered by Chicago electronic musician Greg Davis. 100 percent of proceeds go to Civic Force, a Japanese non-profit specializing in domestic emergency relief. --Emilie Friedlander, Altered Zones

Benefit For the Recovery in Japan is available via Fina Music. Purchasing may take a few tries, as the site has been swamped. Full tracklisting after the jump.