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.

A compatriot, Glenn Branca, wrote an article-– something like, "nothing's happening." ["The Score: The End of Music," New York Times, 2009]. I beg to differ; I think everything's happening. In Europe, in Paris in particular, there was always a lot of African music, a lot of incredible things going on, but they were all imports. There are a lot of sociological reasons for that. Here in New York you can be a bartender, do your gig three nights a week, and support yourself the rest of the week: your music or visual art or whatever. In Europe, if you're a waiter, you're a waiter. That's it. If you're a composer or musician, that's what you do and you're supported for doing that. But if you don't act like your teachers... Well, everyone acts like their teachers and it becomes very conservative. Now, however, there's no money so you've got all these kids that are coming up in Paris, and the only reason they do music is they don't have any choice; they have to do it. You have all this crazy stuff happening: noise-rock, noise-jazz, noise-noise, all kinds of noise. Its happening underground, in the basements of cafes with groups like Blue Sabbath Black Fiji and Sister Iodine. You know, they're [Sister Iodine] the grandparents of that. They're really old: they might be forty. [Laughter] In France they call me Pépé Rhys, which means "Grandfather Rhys," but they say it nicely: "Talibam! was playing and then Pepe Rhys came up to play with them!" Here in America we had the whole New Weird America thing, psychedelic folk. One of the things that I like is you've got more women in the bands and more people playing violins and stuff like that.

I play in two kinds of spaces. When I'm playing trumpet it could be in an art space or rock space; for "Guitar Trio" it tends to be rock spaces or concert halls. The beautiful thing about people in their twenties is that thanks to the Internet, they know music of the '80s. They've rediscovered everything from The Beatles to Bob Dylan to Teenage Jesus & The Jerks and The Contortions, but they also knows groups like Sunn0))), Sleep and Earth. So what you're getting is, the kids are doing what any composer or musician is supposed to do: finding a personal voice, letting the music of the past inform them, putting it through a personal filter. Now you've got groups like Liturgy. I hear them and I think, "Whoa, that's the music I should have been doing when I was trying to do heavy metal." Groups like Sunn 0)))... I get so jealous because I was very interested in heavy metal, particularly Black Sabbath, in the early eighties. Why didn't I think of taking Black Sabbath riffs and slowing them down? But they did it. There's so much happening, so much innovation, it takes my breath away.

AZ: It seems that the average music fan today has much more knowledge than in the past.

Rhys: I'd have to agree with you. When I first played "Guitar Trio," of course I could have done it in an art space like The Kitchen and in fact I did, but I didn't want to start out that way. With the whole post-modern project of the '80s, we had pieces by people like La Monte Young: "feed a piano a bale of hay," the grandfather of which was Cage's "4:33." If feeding a piano as a piece of music was accepted in an art context, of course I could play rock in an art context and it would be accepted. The real question with "Guitar Trio" was could I play it in 1978 at CBGB's or Max's Kansas City, where even if they liked you they threw beer cans at you, with beer still in the cans! The first time we performed it was in the late '70s at Max's Kansas City with Glenn Branca on guitar, Nina Canal of Ut and Wharton Tiers on hi-hat, and I was afraid we'd get beat up, that the people would just destroy us. People were running back to the soundboard and saying, "Where are you hiding the singers?" Of course they were hearing the overtones, which is the whole idea of "G3." The ethereal overtones sounding like choirs of voices. Once that happened, I knew it was cool.

Today, in general, the audiences that come to hear me play, they know my work and the sound man or lady will know my work. When I do my trumpet stuff-– I've really developed this trumpet style in the past few years-– the young audiences hear the references. They'll know who Don Cherry is, who Jon Hassell is, they might even know who Bill Dixon is. If you take a piece like "A Crimson Grail," obviously that's very different from what I do on trumpet. There's still a thread, with the minimalist composition, that unites the two, and the audiences, for the most part, get it.

AZ: You made a distinct split with the guitar for the trumpet in the '90s: you even wrote an essay about it.

Rhys: I even sold my Fender because I just wanted to play trumpet then. Worst mistake I ever made in my life.

AZ: A few years ago, you did the "Guitar Trio Is My Life!" tour and got back to guitar. What was the impetus for that?

Rhys: During the '90s I played primarily trumpet, and I found I started missing guitar. I got another guitar and started working with it simply because I missed it. I don't like to stay doing the same thing all the time; I like to switch back and forth. For a period of time, I put the trumpet away and went completely back to guitar. Now I do both, and I practice every day, both electric guitar and trumpet. I do concerts involving both. I decided to go back to trumpet about three or four years ago for the same reason I went back to guitar: because I missed it. I took it out of the box and it said to me, "Baby, where you been?" So it took me a while to get my chops back.

AZ: You've been based in Paris for nearly 25 years now, but you've always been identified as a downtown New York musician. Do you still think of yourself primarily as a New York musician?

Rhys: I'm applying for French nationality and I've lived in Paris since 1988. My daughter is French, my ex-wife is French, my girlfriend is French, all my roots are in France. Why? Because I like it. I lived in New York for a long time and I thought it was time for a change. I'll never be French to a French person, though I speak fluent French with an accent: "Bon-soir!" [exaggerated]. I feel completely comfortable there, and I've kept visiting rights to America, and I'll always be a New York musician.

AZ: Can you speak about your interest in astrology and Kabbalistic practice, and how this informs your musical practice?

Rhys: My aunt and uncle were rather famous astrologers. During the 1950s, they were the astrologers for The Daily News, which is how they supported themselves. My uncle predicted in 1953 that the planetoid Chiron would be discovered in 1977-- he predicted the longitudinal degree and he got it right within one degree of its actual discovery. He was more on the theoretical side; my aunt was more on the therapeutic side. I grew up around it, so by training I'm an astrologer. In the '90s I got very heavily into Tarot and through that, witchcraft. When I say "witchcraft," it's sort of inflammatory. I got into the Wiccan religion, which is a very beautiful, very soft, very green religion that practices magic. Through that I realized there was something behind witchcraft, which was Kaballah, and I've been studying practical Kabbalah. Practical as opposed to theoretical. Theoretical means you read a lot of books and you can talk about the Zohar; practical means you actually do it. Doing Kaballah is like being in love. If you wanna read about love, you can read Shakespeare; Romeo and Juliet would be a good place to start. But if you wanna do it, you have to practice it; you have to experience it, because in fact everyone makes their own Kaballah.

I've practiced traditional-- which means, essentially, Jewish-- Kabllah for ten years, studying with a mentor. This mentor, by the way, is the dean of a psychology department in Wales. In his outer life he is what we call a ceremonial magician. It's a good thing to be a psychologist when you're studying Kaballah because it's very much about spiritual development and healing wounds from early childhood. It's a good substitute for psychotherapy-- it's an alternative. Does one have to do Kabbalah? No, one can do Jungian therapy, Freudian therapy... My favorite flavor at the moment is Gestalt, which I prefer because it's more interactive.

So to answer your question, while there isn't a direct link between my spiritual practice, I did one record that was a direct link [Three Aspects of the Name, 2003, Table of the Elements]. I felt a little bit nervous about putting it out. It was essentially a mantra-- in Kaballistic practice, we have a whole range of mantras. Everything yoga has, we have in Kaballah, except for the physical exercises. So that was the only time it actually leaked into my compositional endeavors. Some people say that listening to my music is a little bit like being on an acid trip; with A Crimson Grail, it takes you into a meditative space. I didn't do it on purpose, but I guess it comes out. The composer Eliane Radigue, she's been a Tibetan Buddhist for at least thirty years. She first learned she was doing meditative music when she did a workshop at CalArts in the '70s and some student said, "You know, your music is very meditative," and she had never thought of it that way before. She thought, "Maybe they're right. Maybe I should look into meditation." That’s when she met her Tibetan master, and she's been practicing ever since. I suppose there is a link, but if there it's not conscious.

AZ: You spoke very enthusiastically about electronica in the '90s. Do you have any reflections on how that played out as a new direction for music?

Rhys: For me, the scene in the '90s was very exciting and continued to evolve in a fruitful fashion for about ten years. By the year 2000, it started to get boring. The composers relied too much on the programs to make their music: ReBirth, etc. The same problem that composers in the '60s and '70s had with synthesizers like the Buchla. People started working with them and everyone sounded like Morton Subotnick's "Silver Apples of the Moon." You had to work really hard to make the Buchla not sound like that. Essentially, what I saw happen in the year 2000 is that the kids in the '90s all had their computers, just pouring their hearts out making this new fantastic stuff we'd never heard before. By the year 2000, it started to get predictable, so we saw this exodus of people starting to play electric guitar again, playing live instruments-- even violin, as I mentioned earlier. We've got more and more people who were starting to mix them. What was exciting to me was this mixing of instrumental music, this movement of New Weird America, Freak Folk, psych-rock, and groups like Jackie-O Motherfucker. What's interesting to me right now in 2011 is a combination of acoustic with electronic instruments. There are many people working in this manner. Very soon, I'm going to be working with a group called Oneida. Recently, I was trying to write a new piece for six electric guitars, bass, and drums. I did this over the Summer, and it was failure. I realized after knocking my head against the wall that I was trying to repeat what I was doing in the '80s. I guess what I needed to do was bring it up to the year 2011, so I need those guys from Oneida to help me out. I'm rehearsing with them tomorrow. I met them a couple months ago and I'm very excited.

Rhys Chatham's latest releases are Outdoor Spell, now available on CD, download and limited-edition vinyl from Northern Spy Records and Rêve Parisien on Primary Information