We had a wonderful performance of a new work for les 100 guitares, entitled Flamme d’Alban, which was realized on the evening of the summer soltice, 23 June 2018 in Le Havre.  I will be writing more about this event shortly.

Here is a link to some interviews with the guitarists who participated (in French, includes full color photographs):

http://lh.boulevarddesartistes.com/entretiens/entretien-avec-les-guitaristes-du-concert-des-100-guitares

 

We are mounting “Les 100 guitares” this June 23 in Le Havre, France. It’s going to be outside and on the beach, a highly pagan fire festival with 100 electric guitars, and HUGE bonfires!

If you are interested in participating as a guitarist, here is a link to where you can sign up :

Guitaristes, participez à une aventure musicale grandiose !

The rehearsals will be in French, but I will be conducting the rehearsals, and I have a heavy anglophone accent when I speak French, so you will be able to understand me!

Le CEM et le GIP Un été au Havre présentent dans le cadre de l’ouverture de « Un été au Havre 2018 » « Flamme d’Alban Hefin » pour 100 guitares électriques (et plus) de Rhys Chatham le 23 juin à 23h à la plage du Havre.

Rhys Chatham fait partie de ces compositeurs dits « minimalistes ». Au milieu des années 1970, il a travaillé aux côtés d’expérimentalistes soniques tels que Philippe Glass, La Monte Young et Steve Reich à New York. Son univers musical a été bouleversé quand il découvre le premier album éponyme des Ramones. Et c’est ainsi que Rhys Chatham a réuni les deux univers musicaux qui le passionnaient au sein d’une même volonté : celle de créer des œuvres musicales à base d’expérimentation, de répétitivité et de murs de guitares.

—ooOoo—

Performance: Guitar Trio with Rhys Chatham, Robert Longo, Ernie Brooks, Karen Haglof, Jason Bartell, Jonathan Kane, Jon Kessler, and Lee Ranaldo.

Thursday, December 7, 2017

7 pm

Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery, 5th Floor

Two day Guitar Trio workshop in Madrid on 25, 26 November 2017
at Matadero Madrid, Centro de Creacion Contemporanea.

Details here (in Spanish):
http://www.mataderomadrid.org/ficha/7652/convocatoria-taller-de-guitarras-con-rhys-chatham.html

Rhys will be conducting a workshop explaining the special techniques and theory of his work, as well as instruction on how to play this seminal piece, Guitar Trio. The workshop will take place at Matdero Madrid, Centro de Creacion Contemporanea in Madrid, Spain on 25, 26 November 2017 and will culminate with a performance the day after the workshop.

Guitarists who play on a serious amateur level are welcome. The workshop is for amateurs who already know how to play guitar, and would like to learn the techniques used by Rhys Chatham.

Participants would need to attend the entire workshop on Day 1 in order to play in the performance on Day 2. Here is the content of the workshop:

Day 1
60 min – Introduction
Composer will introduce himself and talk about his history, working tactics, compositions, collaborations etc. leading into the composition of Guitar Trio, how it was composed, the history of the piece, how it works

30 min – Gear
Composer will discuss with the participants what guitars work for G3 and why acoustics, hollow body guitars etc. do not work. Talk about pics and sizes/weight, talk about choosing an amp for this, etc.

30-60 min – Tuning
Composer will talk about how to tune, how to work with a tuner, etc. Talk about special tunings in general and the different styles you work with for different pieces and specifically the G3 tuning. Will talk about overtones, how this relates to this piece etc. etc.

– Break –

1.5-2 hours – Playing Guitar Trio
Composers will work with the guitarist on how to play Guitar Trio

Day 2

30 min arrival / set up
2 hours – Playing / rehearsing G3 with live drummer and bassist
30 min – soundcheck
Performance

(Posted after the workshop, on 30 Nomber 2017)

Here is a nice video of the performances surrounding the workshop, including shots of the performance of guitar Trio at Matadero Madrid:

 

LA PLAZA EN INVIERNO 2017 from Matadero Madrid on Vimeo.

—ooOoo—

We’re mounting A Crimson Grail (for 100 guitars) in Sydney, Australia on 12, 13 January as part of the Sydney Festival, the word’s just out!  More info on this to come.

Here is a link to a fabulous review of the Pythagorean Dream concert at the Freakout Club in Bologna from last week. It was written by Massimiliano Speri and it’s quite amusing, in addition to accurately describing the ambience of the concert (in my view).

http://www.ondarock.it/livereport/2017-rhyschatham.htm

It’s in Italian. English translation below:

Ondarock / live report / Rhys Chatham
30/09/2017
Rhys Chatham
Freakout, Bologna

by Massimiliano Speri

How to categorize a historically liminal and artistically hybrid figure like Rhys Chatham? The last of the New York minimalists or the first of Noisers no wave? Perhaps, along with his friend and accomplice Glenn Branca, it is the conjunction ring between the two universes. But there is another thing: in his almost priestly vocation for deafening avant-garde sonic performances (his drone sonata for hundreds of guitar ensembles, immortalized in the monumental “A Crimson Grail”), the now-nationalized Parisian composer is in the end, yet another happy product of that all-American tendency for the conceptual-performative gesamtkunstwerk, a contemporary abstractism without frame or caption boundaries, although more suitable to favor mystical ascent than to sound art galleries.

After the pleasing opening for the solo guitar of Bolognese JH Guraj (delightful american primitivism lying and pastoral, perhaps closer to the disciple Jim O’Rourke than to the master John Fahey), Professor Chatham comes on stage in a Mass at Burroughs / Tom Waits, makes a quick set-up of the complex equipment on the table in front of him and, with scientific discovery, presents himself, his high credentials (throwing here and there the names of Charlemagne Palestine, Steve Reich and Tony Conrad as if they had collaborated it was the world’s most deserved thing) and the recipe that’s about to propose to us: it explains that his usual orchestral armies would be too complicated to take on tour, so he decided to submit himself by presenting himself with loops with a clever game of delays to replicate the stratified rationale of his most extreme experiments; it will be a single, long suite in several parts, and the raw material of each act will be provided by a trumpet, a flute and, of course, an electric guitar; It even tells us the duration of the performance: about 55 minutes. He speaks in a quiet voice and is marked by an adorable yankee partially frantic accent, is relaxed and playful with the public, resembles more a grandfather who wants to entertain his grandchildren than an intellectual intent on épater le bourgeois. After all, we are not talking about a nihilistic rocker but a serious composer, formed in a classical setting as a harpsichord accordion, and then converted to the trial at LaMonte Young, who in the avant-punk arena moved from free beater.

It begins with an overlapping overhang of loud trumpet notes, which seem to flutter in the venue like stunned mosquitos, bouncing between the heads of the already hypnotized spectators. The sound is deliberately dirty and creates a frothy amalgam, which could recall the metaphysical layers of Jon Hassell if he did not evoke a whole urban neurosis in the lines. The second layer provides the Telecaster which, thanks to the open arrangement (“in D minor 7”, the Maestro specifies for us), creates that typical resonance, slightly dissonant, so dear to a lot of psychedelia as well as some work by colleague Terry Riley. After spreading the base of the cake with a velvety bunion garnished with scavenging arpeggios, gives the second pass with a sprinkling of more acute notes, a cobweb of small trills, and stretches the broth with liquid E-bow streaks. The resultant wall of sound is such an icastic and magmatic immobility to sink into trance, a hallucination to be taken religiously seriously. Then touches on the flute, the first instrument approached by young Rhys, here to create long, deep, pasty notes, as if a church organ was played in a rainforest. Depending on moods, this atmospheric ocean can communicate extreme relaxation or extreme tension, if not even the two things simultaneously. Finally, you return to a monotone lament in unison for guitar and voice, the ritual song with which a monk wakes up at dawn the rest of the monastery. The audience is enchanted, now completely taken by both the skill of the magician and the evocative power of the operator.

While the last notes suspended begin to blend with the intrusive delicacy with which they have taken hold of our heads and bodies, Rhys stands up and bows, jokingly excitedly for managing to play the piece within the predicted time duration (54 minutes and 33 seconds) which only went overtime by a few minutes. Then, like a pastor of the past, he sits on stage and invites those interested to reach him for a chat or an autograph: definitely not the typical serious image that tends to associate with an experimental composer …

Chatham’s avant-garde is icy and mystical, algebraic and elusive, rigorous and occult. And the key to decrypt it is perhaps in the title of his last work, “Pythagorean Dream,” from which the performance of the evening takes abundantly the moves: what expression can be more effective than that “pythagorean dream”, to describe this esoteric alchemy of technique and suggestion?

Leaving the Freakout, I start home through the steel and concrete roads of San Donato, Bologna’s most “industrial” neighborhood: perhaps, a scenario not so different from the New York lowlands where this metropolitan shaman began to theorize its fascinating pan-ethnic assault to contemporary music …

—ooOoo—