Rhys Chatham's Guitar Trio (G3) with Pictures for Music by Robert Longo. G3 in Norway at the Kosmische Club.
10 August 2007 - The Kosmische Club http://www.kosmische.org
Musicians:
Drums: Kjell-Olav J¯rgensen (Salvatore)
Electric bass: Bjarne Larsen (Salvatore)
Electric guitars:
Rhys Chatham Marius Ergo (Now We've Got Members/Ergo) Harald Fr¯land (Black Feather /Jaga Jazzist) Per Gisle GalÂen (Crazy River) Daniel Meyer Gr¯nvold (Minn Minn Lights) Emil Nikolaisen (Serena Maneesh)
Producers: Leon Muraglia and John Birger Wormdahl
The Guitar Trio Is My Life tour continues in Europe. The first stop was in Barcelona last spring for Festival Digressions, and the current stop is Oslo, Norway, where I had never been before.
The producers of the G3 event in Oslo were Leon Muraglia and John Birger Wormdahl (otherwise known as Jomba) who mounted G3 at the Kosmische Club in connection with a huge 5-day event featuring over 100 bands called the ÿya Festival (http://oyafestivalen.com).
It all started with Leon contacting me at Myspace to ask me to play. After some discussion, we decided the most exciting thing would be to do G3 in Oslo. I was soon in touch with Jomba and found out that both of them played in a band called Salvatore. They recruited the bass player and drummer from this group to play in G3. Both Leon and Jomba are fine guitarists in their own right, but they decided not to play in G3 themselves since they wanted to concentrate on producing the evening (see program below). So they asked Marius Ergo, Harald Fr¯land, Per Gisle GalÂen, Daniel Meyer Gr¯nvold and Emil Nikolaisen to round out the group on electric guitar.
I was excited about going to Norway since it is the home of black metal and other fine music, and sure enough, upon arriving at the beautiful Oslo airport, I saw a number of heavy looking dudes sporting tattoos over most of their arms. The airport is 25 kilometers outside of Oslo, but there is a high-speed train that goes to the city center. After getting of the train at Oslo Cental, I saw a stunning beauty with raven hair in the main hall, dressed completely in tight black clothing and boasting a really chill looking pair of Dr Martens boots: These Boots Are Made for Walking, as the song goes. Never mind, I already have a way cool girlfriend, I told myself. It was a very good first impression of Norway, though.
I'm 6'2", which is tall, but an even taller rather good-looking rail-thin guy soon came up to greet me, it was Jomba, who had come to take me to the club. We soon arrived, and then Jomba explained that the sound check wasn't until 7 pm, and since it was only 5 o'clock in the afternoon, that perhaps I'd like to hang out at his place for a while, which was only a few minutes away from the club.
The building turned out to be an interesting one. It consisted of an electric blue door that opened out into a courtyard lined with 4-story brownstones, all of them owned by one family.
Jomba explained that the concierge, a gentleman by the name of Lars, was in fact the owner of this complex and is a visual artist. And whenever an apartment became available, he always rented it out to other artists or musicians, so everyone in the complex knows everyone else. I soon discovered that Bjarne Larsen, the bass player, was Jomba's upstairs neighbor, since he was sitting out in the courtyard drinking coffee with his wife and small child (the small child was not drinking coffee though, I don't think...). We were introduced and then Jomba and I went up the stairs to his apartment, where we proceeded to hang out and get to know each other.
Soon it was almost 7 pm, so we headed to the Kosmische Club. I met the guitarists at the club, all of whom had been recruited locally by Jomba and Leon to play in G3. After the initial introductions, it turned out that some of the guitarists had a request for me. Jesus Mary Chain was playing at 8 pm or thereabouts; they wanted to check it out and were wondering if it would be possible to finish sound check in time to go, which they really wanted to do, especially considering that they had free passes to the concert!
I assured them that it rarely took more than an hour to sound check G3. One of the reasons for this is that I send the musicians a cue sheet of G3 in advance of the performance. I also point them to a site where they can listen to the music, so all the musicians from Oslo already knew G3 in advance of the sound check. This being the case, all we had to do was run through the cues and make sure the drums and bass were in the monitor and everybody could hear each other.
Pete was our soundman for the evening, and did a superlative job in getting everything through the PA system. The Kosmische club is a box-like room with the walls painted black and a stage in front and the bar in back, i.e. it is an archetypal room for rock concerts. I knew from just looking at the room that the concert was going to be great: all that intense sound bouncing off the walls in such a confined space!. And they had a huge mother-lovin' sound system which reminded me of the one they used to have at CBGBs back in the old days. Pete had the stage set up in an interesting fashion, with the drums on extreme stage left, with the bass player immediately to his right, and the remainder of the guitarists fanned out over the rest of the stage. We quickly went through the cues and got everything through the PA and monitors, and we were good to go. We even had time to quaff a beer together before the players had to leave for Jesus Mary Chain!
Kjell-Olav J¯rgensen, the drummer, had a few questions about the cue sheet of G3, so we went out the back entrance of the club, where they had a kind of beer garden and tables set up where people could talk over a refreshing glass of ale. Which is exactly what we proceeded to do.
Whilst talking with Kjell-Olav, I realized that the G3 cues are not evident for someone new to it, especially the drummer. The drummer plays a pivotal role in G3, being kind of like the wind that lies behind the fire of the music. If the drummer doesn't play aggressively, the piece isn't as good as it could be. With some rock bands I could name, one gets the impression that they don't like drums very much; that having drums in the band is a necessary evil, and they put the drums way down in the mix. With G3, we like the drums right up there in your face. I explained to Kjell-Olav that he should use every fill-lick he knew in this piece, that it wasn't possible to have too many fills, and that G3 likes LOTS of crash and ride cymbals.
We went over the cues, and then decided to go back to Jomba's place, where Bjarne had already prepared a Norwegian-style dinner for me, consisting of hot Norwegian sausages and a cold vegetable kinda thing that I never had before, which was absolutely amazing. Thus refreshed, we proceeded to discuss music and life with Kjell-Olav until it came time to go to the gig. Our set was slated for 10 minutes after midnight, so we headed over the Kosmische Club at around 11:30 pm.
We got to the club and I was happy to find that the beer garden was packed! Leon and Jomba were very smart in the way they did the programming. The ÿya Festival took place outdoors for the most part, and since there was an 11 pm curfew on outdoor events, Leon and Jomba figured that it would be best to start the Kosmische Club festivities at 11 so that we'd get the people from the outdoor festival. It was a good idea. And it worked! The place was packed.
I was pleased to see that my friend Leif Inge was already there. Leif Inge is a Norwegian visual artist who works extensively with sound. We're on the same record label, the Table of the Elements Records. I had met Leif last summer in Atlanta, Georgia as part of a TOTE festival we did there, it was the start off of the Essentialist tour. Essentialist is my heavy metal group, which I formed in collaboration with guitarist/composer David Daniell. Leif did his 24-hour epic piece called 9 Beet Stretch, which through digital manipulation slows down the Beethoven 9th Symphony, to such an extent that it takes 24 hours to get through the piece. It's utterly fantastic and brilliant, you can hear it in its entirety at this link: http://expandedfield.net/
So I said hi to Leif and told him I'd see him after the gig, and we went upstairs to the comfortable musicians' lounge to hang out with the other players and tune up and do the other things that musicians usually do to properly prepare for playing an intense gig (the producers had thoughtfully provided we musicians with a bottle of Jameson's...).
After a time, Jomba popped in to say we could play if we wanted. So we made our way to the stage. It's always a poignant moment when the band arrives on stage and goes through their pre-performance moves of checking their gear and doing a final tune up. It kind of feels like the portentous calm that precedes a major storm. Sounds brought to us by DJ Barry Kavanagh were wafting out of the PA. And then, all of a sudden, the sound from his spinning turntables went dead and all we heard was the ominous hum of the PA system coming out of the speakers.
We were good to go.
Before I describe the set we played, perhaps I better back up a bit and explain the background of G3...
As you probably know already (or maybe you don't...), the melodic vocabulary of G3 consists entirely of the overtones generated by the low E of the electric guitar. It looks like we spend a long time playing only one note on our guitars, but then the audience begins to notice that there's a lot of other stuff happening, melodies which are forming in the upper reaches of the harmonics of the guitar. We gradually add more open strings, thus making the composite waveform of the sound of the guitars more complex. Eventually one appears to hear choirs and choirs of singers. Perhaps they are people, or maybe they are even angels? Who knows? Hey! Where is the band hiding the singers?!?! Only there aren't any singers...
What appear to be voices are actually the overtones we're playing on our guitars.
G3 was originally entitled Guitar Trio and was first performed in late 1977 in New York City. It was at the height of the No Wave period. We started out with just me and Nina Canal (Ut) on guitars, soon adding Glenn Branca (Theoretical Girls) to make a trio. Wharton Tiers (also in Theoretical Girls) was the drummer, playing the piece only using a high hat. Glenn and Nina soon went on to form their own bands, so after that the band consisted of me, the visual artist Robert Longo and Jules Baptiste of Red Decade on guitars, with Wharton still on just high hat.
Guitar Trio soon became our signature piece and evolved from the half-hour version we did with Nina and Glenn, ultimately shortened to an 8-minute version performed by David Linton on a full drum kit, using lots of toms and cymbals. Using lots of toms and cymbals was David's idea. This short version of Guitar Trio became the definitive one for many, many years.
However, we're in the year 2007 now, right? Guitar Trio is 30 years old.
Jeez, where does the time go?
So when we decided with my record label, Table of the Elements Records, and my management, Front Porch Productions, to do the Guitar Trio Is My Life North America tour last winter, we thought it would be cool to do a re-creation the original long version of the piece that we did in the late seventies with Nina, Glenn and Wharton. In this original version, we had a minimalist movie made by Robert Longo projected behind us, so we decided to include that in the new version, too.
The original version of Guitar Trio of course, was, as the name implies, for 3 electric guitars, electric bass and drums. Since then, I've composed for a much larger groupings of guitars. An Angel Moves Too Fast to See was scored for 100 electric guitars and was first performed in 1989 in Lille, France. I've composed other truly massed guitar pieces since then, all the way up to my latest piece, A Crimson Grail, scored for 400 electric guitars.
So when we decided to remount the original version of Guitar Trio, we decided on using a larger number than the original three guitars. For G3, we use between 6-10 electric guitars plus the electric bass and drums. To avoid confusion, we're calling the new work G3, and this was the version we did in Norway.
OK, let's get back to the actual set we played at the Kosmische Club in Oslo...
Kjell-Olav the drummer counted off and we played a duet together for 16 bars, with me just playing on the low E string of my guitar. Next I cued in Marius Ergo; we played together for another 16 bars or so, then I brought in Daniel Meyer Gr¯nvold and we played as a trio, then Emil Nikolaisen and we played as a quartet, then Per Gisle GalÂen and we continued playing along with the drums as a quintet on guitars, and then I brought in Harald Fr¯land making us a sextet.
And then and only then, when all the guitars were in playing their low E string, I FINALLY cued in Bjarne Larsen on bass. And as he entered, Kjell-Olav J¯rgensen brought in a steady backbeat on drums for the first time. The effect of bringing in the backbeat like this is always quite dramatic when we play G3 the second time through with the full fit. The first twenty minutes were played with Kjell-Olav playing only the high hat. So with the first section, the emphasis is on the sound of the guitars with the high hat providing a steady rhythm for the piece to cohere to, with Bjarne implying the full kit, but only playing high hat.
We got through the first 20-minute section of the music and the audience by that time was fully warmed up, and so were we.
So I announced that we were going to play another number, and we proceeded to play the same piece, EXACTLY the same piece, but this time with Kjell-Olav playing the full kit. The effect with the full kit is like hearing completely different music. We also show the film by Robert Longo that goes with the second set, Pictures for Music, which adds to the atmosphere of the second section, the inner city rhythms of the No New York period.
During the set we did with the drums, performance became more of an issue. Most of the guys playing guitar were listening intently to the overtones, controlling the overall waveform that the six guitars were making through subtle inflections of their picking technique. But I noticed that Bjarne Larsen in particular (on electric bass) was moving around quite a bit. In fact he was actually dancing throughout the entire piece!
I like to dance, too, when I'm on stage, so at one point we got together and did a little dance duo number together. When I did this with Bjarne, he got worried that I came over to his part of the stage to tell him to stop moving around so much! When he realized that all I wanted to do was dance with him, he was quite pleased and we really got into it.
At another point in during the set I felt that the audience on stage right, which is to say my part of the stage, were being neglected. I think this might have been during a 6-string section, where the guitarists are playing intensely on the 6 open strings of the electric guitar, making a kind of E minor 7 chord, but all on open strings. So I got down right in the faces of the people on my side of the stage and soloed for them for a while, it was fun. And when I say I played a solo, I don't mean a speed metal riff. All the technique in G3 is in the right hand, the hand that strums the guitar. So I strummed my guitar as fast as I could during this section with harmonics layered upon harmonics pouring out of my guitar.
Then it came time for Kjell-Olav to take his final drum solo. It takes a strong drummer to pull off G3, and I must say that Kjell-Olav was a real animal, and I mean this as a compliment! He hit the drums hard, yet poetically, somehow. In any case, both of us were sweating bricks by the end of the set. I was really impressed with Kjell-Olav's playing.
Towards the end, we got together on stage in a circle with all the guitarists and played a tremolo (strumming the guitar quite rapidly) together. It was a primal kind of feeling, with all the guitarists coming together like that, we were playing our asses off!
The guitarists played the final chord, and we were all almost ready to collapse, we had been playing so hard... but the audience requested an encore.
So I announced we were going to play a little number in a special tuning, originally developed by the pre-Socratic philosopher Pythagoras.
All of us then proceeded to put our guitars SERIOUSLY out of tune, because in fact, the tuning wasn't Pythagorean at all. It was a new realization of my composition, The Out of Tune Guitar ! Guitars often go out of tune on stage anyway, so in making this composition, I figured I might as well go with the flow of what happens to a guitar on stage in the course of playing it with a certain amount of rigor. And to perhaps even help things along by putting our guitars out of tune, on purpose!
The piece opens up with 6 electric guitars and bass thundering on single chords, played REAL slow. Whomph! Whomph! Whomph! Whomph! Like the sound of a pile driver at a large construction site: Whomph! Whomph! We gradually got faster until the moment where I give a cue, and then everyone plays a fast tremolo.
I gave Kjell-Olav a performance instruction before the gig for this part of the piece. I said, "All you gotta do is hit all of yer drums as fast and as hard as you can, hitting them all at once at the same time. Do this for four minutes."
And that's exactly what Kjell-Olav did. I've never heard anything quite like it. His hands are moving so fast on the video, that you can't really see them!
I brought my video camera along and Jomba made a tape of the performance. My camera is strictly of home-variety quality, but I made an edit for you to look at. The sound quality sucks, but who cares? At least you get an idea of what happened at the performance.
A professional quality video was also made and will be released as part of a DVD of the Kosmische evening, but in the meantime, you can look at these mpegs to get an idea of the G3 show.
After the gig I had people coming up telling me all kinds of nice things. That it was the "best show of the night", that it was the "best show on the ÿya Festival", a couple even said it was the best show they had seen in their entire lives!
OK, so maybe this is hyperbole...
But we musicians like to hear nice things after we have got done playin', so we surely did appreciate the kind things that people said to us. In any case, the entire evening was a success and both Leon and Jomba were happy with what we did as well as the other acts that contributed to the success of the evening, and they were particularly pleased with the number of people that showed up for the gig, as were we.
After the gig, we hung out with the musicians until the bar closed at 3 a.m. Then we went out to another bar called the Sound of Mu, which was part of the building compound that Joma and Bjarne lived in and has interesting music and visual art exhibitions, in addition to where a certain amount of serious drinking can be accomplished. We stayed up talking about music and other important topics until the sun rose, I didn't get to bed until 6:30 a.m.
All to say that I LOVED playing in Oslo with my new friends. I can't wait to come back and do one of my 100 electric guitar projects here.
Links:
Rhys Chatham www.rhyschatham.net Marius Ergo (Now We've Got Members/Ergo) http://www.myspace.com/ergoo Harald Fr¯land (Black Feather /Jaga Jazzist) Per Gisle Galaaen (Crazy River) http://www.myspace.com/crazyriver Daniel Meyer Gr¯nvold (Minn Minn Lights) http://www.myspace.com/minnminnlights Kjell-Olav J¯rgensen (Salvatore) Bjarne Larsen (Salvatore) Leon Muraglia (Kosmische Club, Salvatore) Emil Nikolaisen (Serena Maneesh) serena-maneesh.com/ John Birger Wormdahl (Salvatore)
Leif Inge (Rhys' Norwegian visual artist buddy with the 24-hour sound composition) 9 Beet Stretch - http://expandedfield.net/
Kosmische Club http://www.kosmische.org/who.html ÿya Festival (http://oyafestivalen.com). Sound of Mu bar - http://www.soundofmu.no/
Booking Rhys Chatham: http://www.rhyschatham.net/Booking%20G3%20in%20your%20city....html
Management - Rhys Chatham: Front Porch Productions
