Rhys Chatham’s Essentialist | Empty Bottle, 9/20
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Chatham certainly didn’t form Essentialist to prove he could still cut it in that macho sound world where insane volume levels are the preferred method of cockfighting–his credibility on that front is already permanently assured. He has a background as a classical pianist, studied with La Monte Young, and in the 70s curated experimental-music programs at the Kitchen in New York, but all along he’s been the most rock ‘n’ roll guy in the downtown avant pantheon–more so than John Cale, never mind Glenn Branca. Even if you don’t know that he fell hard for the Ramones, you can hear it in his aggressive take on minimalism’s worship of the overtone: the cranked-up guitars have a searing metallic brutality, like someone shaking a huge sheet of steel, and the rhythms are mostly simple and backbeat driven. Die Donnergotter, a recent collection of small-band pieces from the 70s and 80s (all of which also appear on the 2002 box set An Angel Moves Too Fast to See), sounds like the good parts of every Sonic Youth record run together. Chatham’s the perfect poster boy for the fusion of avant-garde precision and rock ‘n’ roll aggression that came out of the New York underground scene of the 80s–or he would’ve been, if he hadn’t expatriated to Paris at the end of the decade and become one of those artists more heard about than heard.
This may well make Essentialist redundant out of the box–after all, this has all been done, right? Everybody knows what makes metal heavy: the bottom end, the distortion, the brutal volume. How can you strip it down further than Sunn 0))) already has, especially with five people in your band?
“That’s the end of our scheduled set,” Chatham announced after locating the lone vocal mike. “But would you like to hear one more number?” he added, affecting a self-consciously silly voice–he knew damn well the encore was right there on the set list and he hadn’t even bothered to leave the stage. That last number was a Marshall-ized (and slightly shortened) version of his radiant and ever-evolving 1977 composition Guitar Trio, which pulsated, cycled, and swelled–in its own way it was as essential as Essentialist ever got.
