Featuring:
The Rhys Chatham Trio featuring Tim Barnes and David Daniell
John Wiese
Bill Orcutt
This triple-bill concert brings together three powerful voices in experimental rock and noise rock. It is also the album release for Rhys Chatham’s A Crimson Grail (Nonesuch Records), a work for large electric guitar orchestra recorded with 200 electric guitars, 16 electric basses, five conductors, and one percussionist.
Presented by The Empty Bottle, the MCA, and The Wire as part of Adventures in Modern Music. The five-day celebration of outsider sounds teams up this year with SONAR, the world renowned electronic music festival based in Barcelona.
“My Lady of the Loire”
Rhys Chatham Trio (excerpt)
Chatham’s fusion of rock and new music is so uncompromising, so elegant, so simple, and still so new that it takes my breath away. - Village Voice
New York-born and Paris-based composer Rhys Chatham has legendary status in experimental music circles. Classically trained, he studied with La Monte Young and Morton Subotnick, and was a protégé of Tony Conrad. He was the first musician to apply multiple electric guitars to the extended-duration, overtone-drenched minimalism of 1960s music - combining the intellectual experimentalism of the avant-garde with the brashness and punch of punk. For this concert, Chatham teams up with guitarist David Daniell and drummer Tim Barnes, fusing downtempo and driving rhythms alongside the sonic inventions of his trumpet.
Tim Barnes is a Louisville-based percussionist, sound designer, and experimental musician. Over the past fifteen years he has performed and/or recorded with with Sonic Youth, Jim O’Rouke, Tower Recordings, The For Carnation, Text of Light (Lee Renaldo and Alan Licht), Matmos, Mike Watt, and Glenn Kotche (Wilco), Silver Jews amongst many others. He has also worked extensively as a producer and engineer, and established the Quakebasket record label in 1999.
David Daniell is a Chicago-based guitarist and composer who has collaborated extensively with Rhys Chatham throughout the last four years, including the 2006 Die Donnergötter tour, 2007 Guitar Trio tour, and as Concertmaster for Rhys’ 100- and 200-guitar ensemble performances. He has worked for fifteen years as a member of the improvising blues-drone trio San Agustin and with many other collaborators including Loren Connors, Tim Barnes, Jeph Jerman, and Thurston Moore. He has a current duo with Douglas McCombs (Brokeback, Tortoise), a trio with Christian Fennesz and Tony Buck (The Necks), and other projects.
John Wiese is an artist and composer based in Los Angeles who creates meticulous and intoxicating noise and drone music, carefully building dense layers of worlds of sound. He has toured extensively throughout the world, and his ongoing projects include LHD and Sissy Spacek, and plays with many artists as diverse as Sunn O))), Wolf Eyes, Merzbow, Evan Parker, Kevin Drumm, and others.
Wiese excels in making clean, precise cuts between drastically different sounds, building a drop-dead dynamic capable of stepping from almost-absent rumbles and hums to furious noise bursts. - Pitchfork
Bill Orcutt is an experimental musician best known for his work with the 90’s hardcore noise band Harry Pussy. Co-founded in Miami Florida with Adris Hoyos in 1992, Harry Pussy were mainstays of the hardcore scene until their demise in 1997. Orcutt has recently released a hardcore acoustic blues album, channeling everyone from blues legend Lightnin’ Hopkins to improviser Derek Bailey, “and crashes these styles together with such energy that his guitar sounds in danger of splintering into matchwood” (The Wire).