Rhys Chatham - Reve Parisien

I've got a lot of time for Rhys Chatham and his adventures in minimalism. For decades now he's been among the leading edge of New York's contemporary composers, and probably best known for his symphonies for hundreds of electric guitars and his 'Guitar Trio' composition which has become something of a minimalist staple. On this recording here, though, we've just got him performing solo with a treated trumpet, building up looped texture impromptus on the first side, and then on the other side we've got a 17-minute piece which was created to be looped repeatedly in a Parisian gallery. Of the three tracks on the A side the opener is the most palatable, with quite soothing textures blustering around one another in a really hypnotic and blissful way. I'd say that by and large on this track he's playing around in the mid-range, then the second one explores the bottom end before he heads to the high notes on the third. On the number two things get a bit flatulent and it has a real tween wave feel to it, if you know what I mean. It made me laugh pretty hard, 'cause I'm still not too old to find farty noises funny. On the third track he's playing around with the higher registers, building up an almost Eastern-sounding bluster until it's like a swarm of tuneful bees. As for the longer piece on the flip, this is a much flatter and more soothing drone, with the layers of treated trumpet coming across so much like synths that I had to check in the liner notes that he'd not been using those too. It's much more cosmic and soothing and less in the swampy free jazz territory. The ethereal feel that he creates by building lots and lots of sounds on top of one another mirrors that in his many-guitarred compositions of the past and is bound to please long-term fans. This probably isn't the best starting point for this iconic composer ('An Angel Moves Too Fast To See' and 'Guitar Trio' are where to start) but it's a varied and cerebral album that shows he's still right up there with the best of them.