Exploitant la veine ouverte par February (2005), premier LP solo de Jonathan Kane (lire notre entretien), et I looked at the sun (2006), très réussi EP subséquent, Jet ear party recèle de longues plages de « blues progressif ». Kane y roule et déroule inlassablement des boucles entêtantes, expurgeant le genre de toutes ses accidents pour n'en garder que l'essentiel : le riff ciselé, exemplaire, répété ad infinitum. Une quête initiée lors de ses années passées à jouer avec les plus grands du courant minimaliste new-yorkais, mais surtout, la quête ultime du genre duquel il est issu et aux sources duquel il puise son inspiration, le blues : « Ecoute Mississippi Fred McDowell, Son House, John Lee Hooker, nous conseille-t-il. Ces artistes ne jouaient souvent que des pièces consistant en un accord bourdonnant et un riff hypnotique, répétitif ! ».

-Sophie Pécaud, 2009

Lisez la suite dans les pages de Chronicart, ainsi que notre entretien avec Jonathan Kane.

Once upon a time there was Jonathan Kane, a volcanic drummer as comfortable in the world of industrial rock as in those of minimalism and blues. Co-founder of the mythic band Swans and regular collaborator of Rhys Chatham and La Monte Young, Jonathan Kane is probably best known as a drummer. But he is also a talented composer, and has been crafting minimal pieces with a definitive blues feel since 2005, available on Radium, a subsidiary of Table of the Elements.

The story begins in 2005. Jeff Hunt, head of Table of the Elements, asks the artists on his label to interpret and record a piece of their choice for a compilation. With one constraint: the piece has to have been composed by a significant 20th century composer. Jonathan Kane chooses Guitar Trio by Rhys Chatham, a piece he has been performing for a long time in various contexts: “I've always loved playing Guitar Trio with Rhys, but for my own arrangement I needed to slow it down and make it swing. I turned it into a nasty blues. Once I did that, and it worked so well, I immediately started writing my own music for massed electric guitars, with my own, particular, blues-based perspective.”

Combining the principles of minimalism with those of the blues? Carving out a sound within that combination that is at once formally rigorous and irresistibly festive? For Jonathan Kane, all this seems completely logical: “I think I was doing it a long time before I ever knew what minimalism was. Coming from a blues background, as a kid, there were plenty of blues jams that went on for a really, really long time, and not just endless solos, but the groove… deep and long.” And he adds: “Listen to Mississippi Fred McDowell, Son House, John Lee Hooker. These artists will often play pieces consisting of one droning chord and a hypnotic, repetitive riff. Minimalism, yes?”

It is only after returning to straight blues that Jonathan Kane is able begin composing the pieces that would later become February. Gradually, the composer distances himself from his first great musical loves in order to tackle an entirely new one. “After decades of playing minimalism, industrial, experimental rock, improvisation, free music, noise, jazz and just about everything else, my brother Anthony and I reformed Kane Bros Blues Band, our first group. In doing that I rediscovered my absolute love for, and need to play....the blues. Kane Bros. Blues Band gave me the spiritual lift to return to the kind of feeling in music that I crave. Of course, once that was established, then I needed to push the sonic landscape of my own blues further, and so here I am, but Kane Bros Blues Band continues to help me to keep it real.”

February is an opus of five instrumental pieces, each deploying the musical possibilities of the blues in an original way. Imagine Terry Riley copping a Muddy Waters riff and obstinately repeating, deconstructing and recomposing in an exploding kaleidoscope of sound--supported by voluble bass and ardent drums--and that should give you a pretty good idea of what Jonathan Kane's music sounds like.

Why “February” ? “Several reasons. First, and easiest, I finished the record in February, 2005. Next, this music is Blues, and let's face it, February is the coldest, darkest, meanest blue-est month of them all. Nonetheless I love it, I love the winter. I'm very productive at that time of year. Which brings us to the last point. Some bad things have happened to me in February. To the point where the memories caused me to dread the month coming around. When I made this music, it was a cathartic experience, reclaiming the month for me and demanding celebration. And there it is. For me, February represents the best and worst that life has to offer, but in the end it's good, it's positive.”

Since then, Jonathan Kane has continued exploring the musical path he embarked upon with February, first with I Looked at the Sun, which offers a fiery version of the Mississippi McDowell classic, and, more recently, with an interpretation of "The Little Drummer Boy," a Christmas season song revised in an exquisitely incongruous and effective way. “I found myself picking out that melody on my guitar a couple years ago at the holidays, and thought it would make a nice minimalist holiday song. Then last year Jeff Hunt asked all the Table of the Elements artists to record a song for a holiday compilation, and I put dibs on The Little Drummer Boy. Apparently, I was the only one who made one, so he released it as a single!”

A new LP is in the works and should be released at the end of the year. "I have a lot of new material I'm very excited about. It's going to dig deeper into the direction I've begun with my first three records, but there will be some surprises, some new elements introduced, you'll see. I don't want to say too much. I hope to see it released in the Fall of 2008." In the meantime, Jonathan Kane and his live band called… February (!) will be on tour in Europe next Spring. Do not miss them.

Words: Sophie Pécaud
Photo: Bridget Barret



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In 2004, Rhys Chatham was at le lieu unique, Nantes, with An Angel Moves Too Fast to See. Last October 29th, the New York composer was back in Nantes to headline the Soy Festival with his very first electric guitar piece, Guitar Trio. After the majesty of a 100-guitar symphony, the fury of six punk guitars.

Rhys Chatham’s music has two origins. On the one hand, it comes from the minimalist avant-garde, the composer being a part of a hallowed tradition which goes from La Monte Young to Tony Conrad and from Terry Riley to Charlemagne Palestine, and also including the better known Philip Glass and Steve Reich. On the other hand, it comes from the rock of the Ramones: it was a Ramones concert at CBGB’s that allowed Rhys Chatham, who was 25 at the time and more familiar with French composer Pierre Boulez than the effervescent rock scene of his hometown, to “find his own voice”, the voice of a pionneer now known as the initiator of the noise rock movement, and a major influence of many experimental rock groups, such as Band of Susans or Sonic Youth.

“I was composing minimalist music in the vein of La Monte Young at that time. And then, I went to a concert of the Ramones at CBGB’s, and it changed my life. I felt a link with the music. At that precise moment, I borrowed a friend’s Fender electric guitar, and this is how I went into rock. Essentially I thought that if Steve [Reich] could work with african music, and Phil [Glass] could work with jazz, I could work with rock. Why not?”

The result of that research was Guitar Trio, the very first piece to combine the principles of minimalism with those of rock. At first, Rhys Chatham experimented with various configurations– one of them, Tone Death, including a saxophone. After 1977, the piece was standardized as a trio for three eletric guitars, electric bass and drums. Its current instrumentation consists of two to ten electric guitars, electric bass and drums – Rhys Chatham being rather undecided as far as his definition of a “trio” is concerned.

Guitar Trio is based on a very simple principle, whose effects are extremely rich: repetition. Guitarists exert themselves at persistently repeating the same note, and then the same basic chord, for close to 20 minutes. Their aim: to extract all their harmonic substance. As Rhys Chatham reminds us, a note is never “pure” but contains, besides its fundamental frequency, an infinite number of other frequencies, some of them being more audible than others, depending on the instrument and the way it is being played.

From unity may thus arise diversity. From unison, melody. Recalling one of the first performances of Guitar Trio at Max’s Kansas City, Rhys Chatham remembers: “People would come back to the sound board to ask our engineer where we were hiding the singers. The overtones and harmonics we were playing rang out with such clarity that the audiences actually thought they were hearing vocalists.” (1)

Harmonic deployment is the main effect of the use of repetition. It’s not the only one. For Rhys Chatham, repeating the same chord ceaselessly at an obscenely loud volume, with the support of a single drummer who penetrates and structures the general waveform of the sound from the inside, is also a means of creating among his audience – and incidentally, among his musicians – a kind of shamanic state of trance.

The originality of Guitar Trio rests upon the transposition of strictly minimalist principles – repetition, playing with the overtones – into the field of rock, and their subordination to its instrumentation, playing techniques and gesture. Guitar Trio isn’t therefore one of those pieces that only hardened fans of contemporary music can appreciate. It does not rest so much upon a theoretical interrest as it does upon the visceral impact produced by a group of genuine rockers playing very, very loud and very, very fast – the performance ends up with an orgy of tremolos, as well as a certain amount of broken guitar strings…

The impact is all the stronger as Rhys Chatham always works with luminaries of the local rock scene: three quarters of Sonic Youth in Brooklyn, members of Tortoise in Chicago, of Godspeed You! Black Emperor in Montreal. The composer could in no way content himself with a musical joke such as the ventures into rock of Tod Machover when he was at IRCAM (Vatican City of contemporary music in France), or even those of Pierre Henry – the model of the genre being the incredible Messe pour le temps présent of 1967. For it is a matter of respect for the genre.

“When I composed Guitar Trio, it was very important for me not to be an “infiltrator” on the rock scene. It’s very easy for a classical composer – Tod Machover, for example – to write a piece for quote and quote rock and to play in in a classical context. It was very important for me that I play this music – that I gave everything to, my background as a classical composer as well as my background as a rock musician – for a rock audiece, in a rock context, with rock musicians.”

Since 1977, Rhys Chatham cheerfully jumped from three guitars to six (Die Donnergötter, 1984-85), and then to 100 (An Angel Moves Too Fast to See, 1989). His work for electric guitars culminated in Paris' butte Montmartre district with the 400 guitars of Crimson Grail, a monumental yet delicate piece commissioned by the City of Paris for the Nuit Blanche 2005 festival, and – almost – performed last August in New York City as part of the Lincoln Center Out of Doors series.

Last year, the composer had a new epiphany. This time, it wasn’t about the punk of The Ramones, but the drone doom metal of Sleep: “Quite recently, I was touring in a bus, and I heard this group called Sleep in an album called Dopesmoker, and it absolutely blew my mind. I said to myself: ‘Why, this is my music!’” As a result, Rhys Chatham went back to essentials – three guitars, bass and drums – and hit the road again with his new group, Essentialist. His project: to break down metal to its basics elements; to reconstruct it; to transcend its primitive signification. To be heard again soon in Europe and America.

Words: Sophie Pécaud, 2007.
Photo: Renaud Certin.

French version available on Fragil.org, a Nantes-based online culture magazine. Link to original article here.

Note :
(1) Rhys Chatham, Composer’s Notebook 1990. Toward A Musical Agenda For The 1990s, Table of the Elements, Atlanta, 1990.





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Composer Phill Niblock, key player in the New York minimalist scene, isn’t finished making his heady drones ring out all over the planet. On the road eight months out of the year, this composer and filmmaker will set down his suitcases next Thursday in Nantes for a landmark performance at the Musée des Beaux-Arts.

In the music world, Phill Niblock is somewhat of a renegade. Unlike his classically-trained mentors, the four founding fathers of the minimalist school (La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass), Niblock admits to never having felt much of an interest in the whole conservatory tradition. Indeed, it was photography, "something very natural for me," which provided the platform for his first creative peregrinations.

In the mid 1960s, Niblock met choreographer and experimental filmmaker Elaine Summers, who introduced him to video. Their collaboration culminated in 1968 with the creation of the Experimental Media Foundation, "an artist-run organization, […] run for artists," dedicated to promoting "Intermedia" productions--"Film, slides, dance, music, combined, as a performance event." Based out of Niblock’s loft in SoHo, the foundation quickly became one of the nervous centers of the New York art and performance scene. Nearly a thousand concerts have been produced there since its creation.

The concept of "intermedia" art" –distinguished by its proponents from the more commercial "multimedia"—is fundamental in Phill Niblock’s oeuvre. His protracted continuous shots of artisans working were never intended as films "per se," but as part of an ensemble of elements comprising an intermedia performance. "They are extremely real images. But they never have the structure of documentary films. […] Documentary people always hate […] my films. And experimental people hate the films because they are so totally photographic."

Niblock’s relative lack of success as a filmmaker prompted him to hone in on his music. Unlike most of the other composers of his generation, he accepts the label of "minimalist" because he feels it adequately describes the paring down of content and form so central to his work. "The core of what I do is to strip out various aspects of the structure of the medium that I’m working in. So with the music, for instance, there’s no rhythm, there’s not melody and there’s no typical harmonic progression. And the work is very much about non-development, in the musical sense. The same thing is true of the films. Most of the vocabulary of the film is simply not there. Not narrative, no montage. I think there’s two shots that are out of chronological order in the entire 40 hours of film." In the mid 1970s, Village Voice critic Tom Johnson summed up this process with a memorable: "No melody, no harmony, no rhythm. No bullshit."

The music of Phill Niblock is far removed from the repetitive, psychedelia-tinged minimalism of Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. It is closer to the radical minimalism of La Monte Young, which hinges upon duration. The majority of his pieces consist in an ensemble of drones—buzzing held notes which expand out infinitely, evolving almost imperceptibly and emitting a host of sparkling harmonics. For the composer, "the idea is to make this sort floating environment" for the spectator to get lost in, gradually losing contact with reality, and, especially, with time. "If somebody, after an hour’s performance, thinks it was only ten minutes long, that’s perfect. And that happens. People don’t have any sense of how long the thing was."

Niblock’s composition process is very manual, very artisanal—a perfect metaphor for the images that appear in his films. Recordings—once analogue, today digital—serve as his base material. Every one of his pieces consists of an ensemble of drones produced by instruments—always analogue!—that are particularly rich in timbre: electric guitar (Guitar Too, for Four), hurdy-gurdy (Hurdy Hurry), nasal voices (A Y U). The composer combines these recordings, gently modifies their frequencies and allows them to interact. Phill Niblock is passionate about microtonal intervals and the surprising acoustical phenomena that take place when they are allowed to intermingle. At the heart of his music lies a certain indeterminacy—one which distinguishes it from the work of La Monte Young. Often, Phil Niblock allows himself to be surprised by his pieces: "I can predict, but I can’t exactly predict. So that some pieces will be somewhat different than I expect them to be."

Phill Niblock’s pieces are incredibly plastic. If one asks him whether he conceives his pieces in relation to the spaces where they will eventually be performed, he turns the question on its head: "It’s more the other way around, that the music changes incredibly, drastically, depending on the space it’s played in. And, obviously, the sound system. Typically, spaces which are really fantastic would be, like a cathedral, or a large church, which is very open, where there’s a lot of reflection off of surfaces." A spatial dimension accentuated by the composer’s desire to "get people to wander around," to experience the plasticity of the sound material for themselves—a kind of dare, Phill Niblock admits. "Nobody wants to wander around. They get the idea that they should sit there very quietly."

The music of Phill Niblock can appear inaccessible, too intellectual, too elitist. In reality, it is extremely sensual—carnal, almost—accessible to all who are willing to dive in, close their eyes and allow themselves to be carried off by the vibrations. The composer insists that his music (which, in live performance, usually combines recordings and live musicians) be played EXTREMELY loud, so that it fills the room, envelops the spectator and maximizes its harmonic potentialities. Far from assuming a passive role during a Niblock performance, the spectator takes the reigns by carving out his or her own unique path through this extreme acoustic environment. "I’m interested in making a sound world and a visual world which is very much open to different interpretation and different perception. So, if an audience comes and everyone has a different perception of what happened to them, then it’s perfect for me." The very simplicity of the drones, their very "minimalism," opens up a vista for the imagination to roam in, a liberty without equivalent. With no melody, no harmony, no rhythm to guide it, consciousness becomes free in its associations.

The work of Phill Niblock is an experience to live through. Only a professional speaker system and live musicians can do it justice. Next Thursday, April 3rd at the Nantes Musée de Beaux-Arts, you will get a chance. Don’t miss it.

Words: Sophie Pecaud and Emilie Friedlander, 2008.

Performance co-sponsored by Cable# and Apo 33.

French version available on Fragil.org, a Nantes-based online culture magazine. Link to original article here.



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