Rhys Chatham

Rhys Chatham is a classically-trained composer from New York. After he got out of conservatory, he was a concert producer at a place in Soho called the Kitchen, Rhys founded the music program and produced people like Maryanne Amacher, Robert Ashley, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Pauline Oliveros, and Steve Reich on the avant garde side of things; and Brian Eno, Robert Fripp and Fred Frith on the alternative rock side of things.

After a number of years as a concert producer, he got tired of producing other people's music. Rhys had heard an early concert of the Ramones and was inspired by it, so he picked up electric guitar and made a composition called GUITAR TRIO in 1976/77 which combined the minimalist tendencies within which he had been working with a rock instrumentation and musicians.

Rhys was introduced to electronic music and composition by Morton Subotnick in the late 60s, and in the early seventies he studied composition with La Monte Young and played in Tony Conrad's early group. These guys are, along with Terry Riley, the founders of American minimalism; so Guitar Trio is a bit like Tony Conrad meets the Ramones!

Rhys' instrumentation ranges from the seminal composition composed in 1977 entitled Guitar Trio for 3 electric guitars, electric bass and drums, to the epoch evening-length work for 100 electric guitars, An Angel Moves Too Fast to See, composed in 1989... all the way to Chatham's recent composition for 400 electric guitars, Crimson Grail , which was commissioned by the City of Paris for La Nuit Blanche Festival in 2005. All these compositions are currently available on the record label Table of the Elements.

Selected Press