Make a sound big and resonant enough and you might drown out squabbling, at least for a second. That has been the implicit mission in Rhys Chatham's music ever since he introduced Guitar Trio to the world in the late 1970s. The reaction many people have to hearing Chatham for the first time is some variant on "I didn't know this existed." "This" being an idea about the uniting power of pure sound, and the way it leaps over low borders set to contain it. Sounds, when they are powerful enough, rip through flimsy fabric, and how we feel about them, the arguments and justifications and rules we invent in their wake, are mere spasms, just a post-mortem.
Such are the lofty thoughts, anyway, you might find yourself encouraged to entertain while listening to one of his oceanic guitar works, often set for mighty, taking-of-Helm's-Deep-style forces—100 guitarists! 400! His Guitar Trio is so iconic it's become a traveling revue of sorts, lighting up audiences of faithful everywhere it goes. The piece is so schematically simple Chatham can teach it to a new group, he claims, in a few minutes. But it generates layered, immense feelings of peace, contentment, exhilaration, conjuring the primal sensation of the first moment anyone ever plugged in an electric guitar and strummed, before any actual learning to play occurs. It represents some of the most transcendent and powerful work a single E chord has ever done.
Chatham's material scales upward into vista and back down into pinprick, depending on the work at hand. His latest release Harmonie du Soir, resides peacefully somewhere in the middle distance. The title work is set for an ensemble of six guitars and drums, his first such piece for this configuration since the mid-80s. The piece opens chiming on the root and fifth of an A chord, which is where it calmly stays, for eight minutes or longer. Marc Masters wrote movingly, earlier this week, about the curiously individual qualities of different kinds of drone, and he's right; there are drones that summon feelings of elemental horror and awe, drones that feel like the wheeze of a timeshare air conditioner. All of them have a quality that lures us toward them, a blank beam of light we can't help but stare into. Because it resides so firmly in the nonverbal realm of sound, it proves difficult to isolate, but allow me to try: Chatham's drone has a fluid sense of motion it, a dynamic sense. To use a metaphor from an earlier age of media, Chatham's guitar works have always sounded to me what the tape head cleaner might actually be playing if I just turned it up loud enough. Good drone music is body music; it just feels good.
Harmonie du Soir eventually snaps into a second section—an E Chord, surrounded by drum fills, which eventually clarifies into a metronomic and deliberate riff. It sounds like the intro to a classic Television song that suddenly backed itself into a corner and became afraid to move. You might think about any number of things while the piece continues chiming in your headphones for the remaining 10 minutes—you might think about groceries that you need to pick up on the way home, or the third Pretenders studio album, or how certain ideas about music and sound never seem to lose their resonance, no matter how dated they might sound on paper.
The other two pieces on Harmonie Du Soir approach Chatham from different angles. The Dream of Rhonabwy is set for a 70-piece brass ensemble—minutes on end hang on nothing but brass drone, which, due to the vagaries of human breath, simply don't stay in tune. They move in and out of sour, beating semitones and waver back into unison, a drumbeat intruding occasionally onto the reverie. The piece swells, quietly, into some of the most harmonically sensual writing Chatham's done in awhile. And Drastic Classicism Revisited is exactly what it says it is—a screeching, clawing tear through a work that, along with Guitar Trio, more or less secures Chatham's legacy. The performance on this album, from 2012, has an anarchic propulsion, the drumming positively gleeful, near-sloppy at the edges. It is a primal wallow in how noise-rock feels, if not necessarily an example of noise rock as we know it. It is the uncooked stuff of rock music stretched out into infinity, what the best three seconds of every rock song you've ever loved felt like, and it hits a platonic spot in your mind.
