Woove staff writer Todd Stafford reviews Rhys Chatham's release A Crimson Grail (2010), a neoclassical work featuring two hundred electric guitars.

One of the most over-used words of the last decade, “epic” has come denote everything from mildly amusing to downright mundane in the mouths of the YouTube generation; of consequence, when neo-minimalist composer Rhys Chatham performs one of his recent orchestral pieces with no less than two hundred electric guitars, we face a significant gap in the available and appropriate diction.  And really, this underplays the situation by half: while Chatham’s new release of A Crimson Grail on Nonesuch Records features an outdoor performance with 200 guitars at the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival, the smaller Table of Elements label has previously released an indoor performance of the piece with twice that many performers, a somewhat more smooth delivery, more atmospheric sounds, and significantly more reverb.  Chatham’s work abandons the scronk of brass that has dominated some of his more recent work, returning to the sounds of the New York No Wave scene that he made famous with the likes of Glenn Branca.  And, indeed, we can easily discern similarity between Chatham’s new work and Branca’s relatively recent sequel to Ascension, also on Nonesuch Records: both pieces develop sophisticated neoclassical compositions using plodding rhythms and textures and timbres more frequently associated with fringe-y punk rock subgenres, gradually accumulating into powerful and sometimes noisy crescendos that should easily satisfy those of us who missed out on the $70 to $300 tickets for the new Godspeed You! Black Emperor tour.  

This composition opens with a relatively atmospheric overture that establishes the oceanic tenor for the unusual deployment of guitar tones to follow.  After fading to a short silence, Part I begins again, this time with a minimal drum figure and a relentless monotone bass note on every downbeat.  Relatively clean-sounding guitars ring out; their slightly out-of-time, yet simultaneously restrained, delivery create rather complex polyrhythms which contrast to the stark simplicity of the percussion.  Gradually building up to a moment that combines a chorus of distorted guitars and staccato picking to evoke something akin to feedback, these understated chords resolve into a short melodic figure that recalls the theme to the Steven Spielberg film Close Encounters of the Third Kind before counter-climactically fading into a disorganized group mumble of twinkling guitars.  But this is just a false peak in the work’s climb towards crescendo, and the concluding minutes of Part I offer an imagistic wash of distorted guitars that build into a chaotic, but oddly peaceful apogee.

Considerably shorter and more lyrical, the penultimate part of Chatham’s composition offers wave-like pulsing swarms of guitar sounds that more often resemble their bowed brethren at the symphony or concert hall than the beer-soaked bangers familiar from a night at the bar.  Though harmonious, calm, and collected, the second movement builds to an understated apex -- more the rise of a hill than the peak of a mountain -- before almost unnoticeably fading to silence and then into the rock-ready intro of A Crimson Grail's concluding movement.  In Part III, the influence of the first-generation of minimalist composers finds particularly obvious voice, particularly that of La Monte Young, with whom Chatham began his musical career, but also the hypnotic approaches heard in Steve Reich’s work or in some of the more unassuming John Adams pieces.  At the same time, it seems that Chatham may have been paying attention to instrumental post rock bands like Explosions in the Sky, who have themselves been considerably influenced by the likes of Chatham and Branca.   Even so, A Crimson Grail demands a considerably more focused attention span, building very slowly towards an expressive and poetic repeating guitar figure that carries the listener lightly across the persistent rock percussion that intimates and foreshadows an aggressively-delivered final three minutes.  This conclusion features rapidly strummed guitars placed carefully in the Nonesuch stereo image (and, thus, presumably also on the live stage) to create a rich and heroic sonic portrait.  Appreciably increasing in volume, the percussion adds depth to the anxious final pinnacle, which Chatham resolves with a curiously dissonant collection of chords and quietly struck notes before the album concludes in much-deserved applause.

While it does not feature the extreme aggression of some moments on Branca’s most recent release, it is fair to assume that audiences that were excited to hear a return of the No Wave neoclassical sound with this summer’s release will be equally pleased with this new Nonesuch recording.   Improving on the quality of the Table of Elements CD earlier released while also offering a somewhat different vision of the composition’s merits, this performance offers a glimpse at how the electric guitar can be transformed by skillful hands from a low-brow instrument best known for accessibility and simplicity and into a fully-voiced focal element in compositional music without robbing it of its libidinal energy.