Rhys Chatham's Guitar Trio (G3), with Pictures for Music, by Robert Longo
at the Soy Festival in Nantes, France
...at le Floride - 29 October 2007.
Electric guitar:
Rhys Chatham
Thomas Le Corre
Régis Gautier
Matthieu Goyal
Arthur de la Grandière
Sophie Pécaud
Electric bass: Charles-Eric Charrier
Drums: Pierre-Antoine Parois
Sound engineer: Stephane Baujon
Lights and backstage: André Fevre
Backstage and support: Caroline Aubert, Amandine Rouzeau, Anousonne Savanchomkeo
Rhys Chatham booking: Front Porch Productions
 |
 |
 |
 |
Top left box: Sophie Pécaud, Arthur de la Grandière. Top right box: Arthur de la Grandière, Thomas Le Corre
Bottom left box: Rhys Chatham (finger to mouth) , Pierre-Antoine Parois behind the drums, Charles-Eric Charrier at right.
Bottom right box: Charles-Eric Charrier, Matthieu Goyal, Régis Gautier.
---ooOoo---
When my booking agent, Regina Greene of Front Porch Productions, told me that the Soy Festival had contacted her and that I was going to be playing a G3 event in Nantes, I was very pleased. The last time I played there was in 2004 at Le Lieu Unique for my composition for 100 electric guitars, An Angel Moves Too Fast to See. That particular Angel performance in Nantes was a significant one for me in that it marked my "comeback" as a guitarist. Prior to that, I had been focusing on my work as a trumpet player, but by 2004, I found that I missed playing the electric guitar, so I decided to return to it. Nantes was the city of my first appearance with les 100 guitares since 1996, and I have many fond memories of the rehearsals and performance we did at le Lu and made many friends while I was there. So I was really looking forward to seeing everyone again in the context of the Soy Festival.
The Soy Festival is a yearly series of events produced by Association Yamoy, a collective of artists and musicians who organize concerts of varying genres: pop, folk, post rock, math-rock, hardcore, electronica, hip hop, and from time-to-time, hard core minimalists like me! The concerts take place in different locations in Nantes (Olympic, Lieu Unique, Pannonica, Barakason, Live, Bobard, Violon Dingue, Maison de quartier de Doulon, Rue'pture, le Blockhaus DY10, Planétarium ...)
We were originally going to play in a new club called Ferrailleur, but the booking people there got confused and the owner, without telling anybody, had booked a Finnish heavy metal act the night we were supposed to play. And what the owner wants, the owner gets, so we were booted out of there. Fortunately, the Soy Festival people found another site for us to play in, le Floride, which is a long established rock club in the docklands area of Nantes. It's kind of a Nantais version of CBGBs, so it was perfect for us.
The concert was on Monday, but I decided to leave for Nantes the day before. When I played G3 in Oslo, I had to wake up at 5:30 in the morning in order to pack and get to the airport on time, because my flight was on the same day as the concert. The concert started at 11 p.m., so I ended up with a day that started at 5:30 a.m. and continued to 6 a.m. the next day! It took me almost a week to recover. I wanted to avoid a repeat of this experience, so when Soy Festival contacted Regina for me to play G3 in Nantes, I asked to arrive the evening before I was to play, so that I could be fresh for the day of the concert.
Accordingly, I left for Nantes the day before, and arrived there in the early evening. Pierre Templé, one of the organizers and co-curator of the festival, was at the train station to pick me up and bring me to my hotel. A really cool group called Zëro, from Lyon, was playing that night, but I was kind of tired from a fairly full preceding week, so I just hung out in my room at the hotel, watched TV and practiced on my "Iceman" brand electric guitar.
The next day, refreshed, I was ready to play. Pierre picked me up at around 1 p.m. in the festival truck, and we were on our way.
Pierre Templé.
Pic by Rhys
We picked up a couple of the musicians on the way to the club. The way G3 works is I go to the city where the concert is going to be played, and work with local musicians there, which the organizer is responsible for finding. I got the idea for doing this from An Angel Moves Too Fast to See . The 100 guitarists are locally recruited to play in this piece. It worked well for Angel, so I thought it might work well for G3, too. Doing things this way has a number of advantages. I get to meet and play with fabulous new musicians, and as an added plus, it saves quite a bit of cash spent on hotel bills and travel!
Angel was written in such a way that it is interesting to play for both professional musicians as well as serious amateurs. I wrote the music so that some of the parts would be challenging for professionals, and some of the parts could be played well by amateurs, even of modest ability.
G3 doesn't work like that. We usually only have one rehearsal on the day of the concert to master the piece, most of the time at the sound check itself! So it is important that the musicians all be magnificent, which is why I always ask the promoters to recruit the best people they can find in the town we are playing in.
So the first musician we picked up was Charles-Eric Charrier, the bass player. I took one look at Charles-Eric, standing there on the street waiting for us with his amp and bass, cigarette hanging out of his mouth and three-day beard developing, and I just knew that things were going to be groovy. It was kind of like love at first sight! We got to talking in the van, Charles-Eric plays both acoustic and electric bass in a wide variety of contexts and also does music for film and dance. Somehow the conversation turned to improv, and it turned out that Charles-Eric knew my good buddy, Jean-François Pauvros, and seen him play in the seminal French free improv group, Catalogue.
Next, we stopped by Sophie Pécaud's house to pick up her equipment. Sophie had played Angel in my 100 guitar band in Rouen as well as in Mons, Belgium. We became friends and she has translated into French, among other things, my essay on music from the downtown NY scene during the seventies to the nineties. Sophie already knew my work, so she seemed like an obvious choice to be in the band. She had brought an awesome red Stratocaster with her. She joined in the conversation with me and Charles-Eric and mentioned that she had heard that the French cornet player Jac Barrocal had played with James Chance and the Contortions recently. Wow! Now THAT is a combination of talents that I await with impatience to see myself one day on stage!
Sophie Pécaud and Charles-Eric Charrier in the van on the way to the G3 rehearsal.
Pic by Rhys
We then arrived at Le Floride. The door opens into a room that contains the bar, and then one continues into another space, which is the performance area.
All the musicians were there, some of them had played with me already in Angel at Le Lu, so things were relaxed and friendly and the rehearsal went smoothly. The room was relatively small, holding only a max of 300 people, so we didn't need to amplify the guitars amps, we only put some amplification on the bass and drums, putting my guitar a bit through the monitors. Stéphane Baujon, the sound engineer, was a little worried that the stage sound of the guitars was too loud, and that we should turn down so that we could better hear the drummer, Pierre-Antoine Parois. Stéphane kept telling me this, and I kept saying "What?", until he finally got the idea that I was totally deaf. I then explained to him that the reason I need to play at loud volume levels is because it is the only way I can hear anything! Stéphane was starting to get seriously worried, and then I let him understand that I was only kidding. So we turned the backline down a bit until we could hear Pierre-Antoine Parois clearly in the PA system. Stéphane was much relieved!
After the rehearsal, all the musicians went back to the bar and hung out there. The bar was staffed by Caroline Aubert and Amandine Rouzeau, both of whom were members of Association Yamoy. They had prepared a delicious lunch for the band consisting of all kinds of good things, so everyone dug in and enjoyed their meal. I had a talk during lunch with one of the guitarists, Régis Gauthier, who had come equipped with an amazing looking Rickenbacker guitar, and it turned out that, in his spare time, he is a research chemist with a Ph.d. who deals with, among other things, spectral harmonics. So soon we were involved in a hot conversation about the harmonic series, discussing ratios and beautiful intervals like 63/64, and of course the comma of Pythagoras, 80/81. It turned out that he and his band mate, Thomas Le Corre, had come all the way from Rennes especially to play the concert.
Régis Gautier with red Rickenbacker...
Pic by Mathieu
Raballand
Next, I did an interview with a local magazine. Sophie Pécaud is writing now for a web and print magazine based in Nantes about independent culture and society called Fragil. So we did a quick interview and photo shoot after lunch. She had brought along Renaud Certin, who explained that an editorial decision had been made at the magazine, and that the answers to Sophie's question had to be no longer than 90 seconds, since it was going to be published as a sound byte and most people's attention span on the web is somewhat limited! This was no easy task, as the kind of questions Sophie was asking were along the lines of, "Why did I choose to revive the original version of Guitar Trio rather than some other early piece, like Drastic Classicism or Die Donnergötter?". Yikes!
We did the interview in both French and English, everything went fine. Then we went outdoors for Renaud to do a photo shoot. Renaud is, among other things, a talented photographer and he got some awesome shots. You can find the results of the interview and photo shoot at this link:
(Note: photos and interview available after 14 November): http://www.fragil.org
After the photo shoot, I went back to the hotel because I was a bit tired and needed to rest up. We were to play at 11:30 p.m., so I figured I'd catch at least one of the other bands at 10 p.m. But then, I realized that all the bands that were playing were based on the East coast in America, so I started feeling that maybe I should catch all the acts. So at 7:30 I called the Soy Festival and asked them to pick me up at my hotel and take me to the gig.
As I've already mentioned, I was a bit concerned about the fact that we were headlining on a Monday night, which is to say that we went on last, ostensibly at 11.30 pm, and probably a bit later than that. Also, Le Floride is not in the center of Nantes, but in an out of the way location, so I was getting worried that we would have precisely two people in the audience. I mean, most people have to get up early and go to WORK on Tuesday, right?!?!
The place was packed with people, all my worries about no one showing up were in vain. So I made my way upstairs to the dressing room and hung out with Charles-Eric, as well as some of the other guitarists in the band, Matthieu Goyal and Arthur de la Grandière.
The first band to play was called Sunburned Hand of the Man. The opening of their set reminded me of NY performance art of the 70s and 80s, bringing to mind of some of the work of Geoff Hendricks and Joan Jonas. They made heavy use of props. There was something funky about it, and fun at the same time. The props that they used were visually striking, such as a large, red rubber glove that they put on a stick that they paraded around, like a Roman banner, going directly into the audience to this. They also had a stuffed goat's head attached to the end of a long pole, which they were waving around menacingly. The music consisted of what sounded like a bunch of cans being banged together interspersed with occasional wailing, heavily-reverbrated electric guitar riffs. There was a rustic feeling about the performance. It was as though we, the audience, had been transported to a forest, where a rite to the pagan god Pan was unfolding.
Sunburned Hand of A Man
Pic by Rhys
The set opened with performance art type stuff, so it was a bit surprising for me when they started actually playing music, I didn't think they were going to. The bit I remember best was a slow, dirge-like guitar line and drum kit beat with distant overtones of the group Om contained therein, definitely my kind of thing. I loved what they did.
I talked to them afterwards, they come equally out of music, visual and performance art, and it shows in their work. Here is their web site:
http://www.myspace.com/sunburnedhandoftheman
After the set I ran into Kitty Hartl, the music curator of Le Lieu Unique. She was at the bar, and she was the person who brought Angel to Nantes back in 2004. We chatted a bit, she was impressed when I told her that all the people who were going to play G3 that night had come from the region of Nantes. We caught up on each other's lives, and then it was time to hear the next set of music.
The next band to play was called Jackie O'Motherfucker. I only caught one of their songs because I had to get back upstairs to the dressing room to tune and prepare for my set. Fortunately, Sophie Pécaud heard and covered their entire set for Fragil , here is what she wrote:
"Jackie-O Motherfucker is an experimental folk collective formed in Portland in 1994 by Tom Greenwood and Nester Bucket. Performing in many diverse formats, the collective from the beginning has been a guitar and saxophone duo, accompanied by sound collages comprised of home recordings, rock cut-ups and hip-hop beats. JOMF's lineup for its European tour, making a stop at the Soy Festival, is a classic one: a drum kit, two singers, three guitars going through many effect boxes. Three guys and one gal, one of them proudly sporting an Ecstatic Peace! T-shirt, which is the name of their new record label.
"JOMF's set is a long voyage in the world of a psychedelic and sometimes disturbing folk. The roots of the group are firmly in the heritage of traditional American folk - as vouched for by its melodies and the vocal lines as well as the initial simplicity of the chord progressions. But if JOMF takes on this heritage, it is in order to better pervert it, drawing it towards sound experimentation that border on being psychedelic. Traditional song structure is rejected. We catch a verse here and there, but never a refrain. As soon as we sense that a formal structure is being established, the band members of JOMF take delight in losing us again with their improbable solos. Which finish in the form of a mantra : heady, catchy riffs comprised of a limited pitch range, intricacy of the three guitars who at will go in and out of synch, extreme extension of the duration of the pieces, everything possible is done to hypnotize the audience.
"Sometimes, within the transparent layers of sound constructed by the four musicians - the drummer only rarely ventures into a pounding beat, and contents himself with simply punctuating the musical phrases of the guitars, one of whom assumes the role usually devoted to the bass with subtlety and finesse - voices arise. Sometimes a male voice, at other times a woman's. Voices which groan in complaint more than they affirm anything, which implore rather than preaching at you. Breathy voices which melt rapidly into the general waveform of the sound, rising up and going down in volume, taking the listener on a voyage to the borders of "New Weird America", which the British Magazine The Wire had on its cover recently.
"The only regret is that the "john-calian" violin present on numerous recordings of JOM could not join the three guitars for the evening at Soy Festival."
You can find Sophie's original article (written in French) at this site:
(article available after 14 November) http://www.fragil.org
Jackie-O Motherfucker
Photo by C. Féray - http://myspace.com/wcfonts
JOMF's set being finished, all the musicians of G3 were upstairs to complete a final tuning of our instruments, we were ready to play.
It was almost midnight on a Monday night in Nantes, in a neighborhood that was far away from the center of the town. The house was still PACKED! All my fears about having only about two people left were thus thrust away. The Soy people really knew what they were doing, having been putting on festivals of this sort for the last five years. G3 works best when played for a full house, so I was very pleased.
All the music of G3 lies in the overtones being generated by the low E string of our electric guitars. The musicians had already heard previous performances, so everyone knew exactly what to do The piece is divided into three basic sections. In the first section, we play on one string, the low E string of the electric guitar.
For a novice, this sounds like we are a punk band that is somewhat mentally retarded; most punk bands play at least three chords, we are a band that only plays one! But even uninformed people sense, on a deeper level, that something more is going on with the music, that this music is more than simply an articulation of one note. That, in fact, it is not just one note at all, but much more than that. For in addition to hearing the fundamental frequency, they are hearing all the beautiful overtones generated from the fact of our playing the low E, at obscenely high levels of volume.
We do not play at a high level of sound in order to assault people, we play at high levels because the overtones ringing out above are very delicate. We in the West are not used to focusing on them. So we play at the levels of volume that we play at in order to hear the delicate poetry of the overtones above the fundamental frequency we are playing. Also, we play at these volumes, because, frankly, it is the only way I can hear anything, for I am at this point almost deaf from playing with les 100 guitares for almost 20 years now!. ;-)
The first set was played with the drummer, Pierre-Antoine Parois, playing only the high hat, as we did in the original version back at Max's Kansas City in New York in the 70s. I cued him for his "solo", and he went into a Max Roach kind of thing, it was heroic, to say the least!
Pierre-Antoine Parois solo!
Pic by Mathieu Raballand
Then we went to the second set, where Pierre-Antoine plays the full drum kit for the first time along with the film that the visual artist Robert Longo made for the piece. During the short break in between the two parts of G3, I announced all the names of the musicians to an appreciative audience, and asked them if they wanted to hear the second part of the piece. The audience agreed, so we went on to do precisely this.
The second part started up, with Pierre-Antoine playing the full drum kit and Robert Longo's large majestic black and white images slowly unfolding on a side wall of the club. All of the musicians were fully warmed up at this point, having played G3 with only the high hat for 20 minutes already. I was already in tune with the audience. As I play, I like to look at them, to interact with them. And by this point in the performance, I felt that I had a rapport with the people.
So we went into the one-string section, where we are only playing the low E. I did something that I never did before, I played continually on the off-beat, that is to say, on the "and" of each beat. One AND two AND three AND four AND, and so on. As I was doing this I noticed a slight smile on the face of the bass player, Charles-Eric. He picked up immediately on what I was trying to do, for he is an improviser, as indeed were the rest of the band. This groove had never been played before in the context of G3; everybody got into it.
Charles-Eric, Matthieu Goyal and Régis gettin' into the new groove of G3!
Pic by Mathieu Raballand
Then we went into the 3-string section, where we played a basic power chord in the key of E. Things got more intense during this; the audience was getting down and one guy thrust off his shirt and was waving it around while madly dancing. The Dionysian element of G3 was starting to kick in!
Rhys in with the audience, you can see the shirtman dancing madly in the background...
Pic by Mathieu Raballand
During the first 6-string section, where we play all 6 strings of our guitar in a chord of low E, B e'', g'', b'', e''', which is a kind of E minor 7 chord, things became truly psychedelic. It started to be as though we were all on an incredibly groovy acid trip. We heard choirs and choirs of people cheering us on. Was the audience cheering us on and screaming and yelling and hollering during this? Of course they were. But we were hearing more than that, much more. During both six-string sections, it sounded as though we had literally hundreds of people singing in unison, the effect of the culminative overtones of the electric guitars and bass of the very merry musicians from the region of Nantes.
It was quite emotional, hearing these sounds: for myself, the rest of the band and the audience. I immediately jumped into the crowd and dropped to my knees, and started singing in unison with the overtones we were hearing. It was a moving experience for me. One of the most emotional I ever had playing this piece. It was a bit as though I were making love, and that ALL the musicians present were making love: with the audience, with the sound, with the music !!!! A truly orgasmic and almost pagan experience for all concerned.
A pagan rite!
Pic by Mathieu Raballand
The God Pan was present during this section of G3, that's for sure. Perhaps it was Sunburned Man of the Hand who brought him there ritualistically for us during their opening set!
The concert finished and the audience kept applauding. It soon became evident that they wanted an encore, the only problem was that half the musicians had already made their way to the bar! I made an announcement that we were going to play another number, and the missing musicians soon returned.
The other problem was that the band had not rehearsed or prepared in any way for an encore. I quickly resolved this by announcing to the audience that we were going to play in a special tuning developed by the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras. Then I turned away from the microphone, and I privately told the musicians to simply put their guitars SERIOUSLY out of tune, hit a chord 16 times, and then on my cue, to play as fast and as hard as they could for three minutes on all six strings.
Sophie, Arthur, Thomas and Pierre-Antoine,
listening intently to Rhys explaining what the heck they were supposed
to be playing for the encore!
Pic by Mathieu Raballand
We weren't going to play in a Pythagorean tuning at all (for you see, I lied...). We were going to play some seriously loud noise rock! I then told Pierre-Antoine to play a hit on each of the opening chords, and then, on the tremolo, to simply hit all his drums at the same time as hard and as fast as he could.
The chords thundered out, it was like the sound of an incredibly huge, Nordic lightening god stomping heavily with his massively large feet in the wooded moon-lit valley, wolves wailing in the background, and when we got to the tremolo, it was totally awesome!
Pics of encore by Mathieu Raballand:
 |
 |
 |
Another round of applause, and I practically flew upstairs to the dressing room to collapse. This was one of the most arduous concerts emotionally that I had ever done of ths piece. I was completely drained. The music we had played was an exceptionally good performance of G3, I hope that someone recorded it.
Collapsing in the dressing room after the gig with Charles-Eric and SJ Esau.
Pic by Anousonne Savanchomkeo of Festival Soy. http://www.myspace.com/anousonne
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the musicians who played G3 for such a superlative performance, as well as Association Yamoy for inviting us, and for all the love and support that they put into the programming and support of the entire festival.
Some web links:
Soy Festival: http://www.myspace.com/festivalsoy
Association Yamoy: http://www.myspace.com/yamoyrules
Charles-Eric Charrier: http://www.myspace.com/charlescoldman
Arthur de la Grandière: http://www.myspace.com/papiertigre
Pierre-Antoine Parois: http://www.myspace.com/papiertigre
Sophie Pécaud: http://www.myspace.com/sophiepecaud
Anousonne Savanchomkeo: http://www.myspace.com/anousonne
Fragil Magazine: http://www.fragil.org/
Front Porch Productions: http://www.myspace.com/frontporchproductions2
Rhys Chatham: http://www.myspace.com/rhyschatham
Video of excerpt from the G3 performance at the Soy Festival: