'Just after a few minutes is comes alive'

Interview with Yuri Landman about Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio (1977)

by Marijn Schrijver published in ‘De Volkskrant’, (translation: Y. Landman)

Friday night guitar builder Yuri Landman (35) from Veenendaal (Holland) will be one of the guitarists joining Rhys Chatham with his performance of 'Guitar Trio', the endless lengthy composition where only one note is played. 'Only the first moments are boring.' by Marijn Schrijver 

With composer Rhys Chatham and six other guitarists you are going to perform a composition from 1977 that lasts 45 minutes. Only one note is used. Isn't this boring after a few minutes?

'Just after a few minutes it becomes really alive. In the beginning you indeed think: Pretty boring, but when the tone continues you become aware it has just started. The piece is played very loud, with a heavy volume. Because of the repetition of this one tone a meditational transcendental effect appears. That's the minimal musical side of this music.

Which note is it actually?

'I think it is just an E-minor 7. Although it is only one note, you still can play this one note very differently. If you read the sheet music - in this case just an A4 - you might think it all is very complicated, but if you know a bit about overtoning spectra and physics this is not so difficult. Hitting the string at different positions still creates this E, but reinforces or mutes specific overtones. You hear a fluctuation of overtones and some kind of a landscape of sounds appears. The noise is so loud, which forces you to search for the beautiful aspects in the sound. You can focus on what is changing.'

The piece is called Guitar Trio. Shouldn't it be played with three guitarists?

'The title is called after the 1977 performance with three guitarists in New York where it was played for the first time. Later Chatham added more guitarists for performances. There is also a piece by Chatham where 400 guitarists play simultaneously, it's all possible. You don't have to change anything on your guitar tuning. In this composition you only play the most upper string, the E. Then you proceed with playing two strings, three and finally six strings. Then you play an E-chord.

Would you call the piece simple or very abstract?

'People think it is very simple, because how to play the musical piece is so easy. But Chatham just knows about harmonic overtone theory and the piece represents these underlying layers of intelligence. It is not just made up out of the blue. The repetition is not just endless because of the artistic dada statement only, on the contrary even in this case. And it's like a painting of Mondriaan: You could say it is just a simple construction made with a ruler of you might interprete it as a return to the basic colors and primary shapes. I would like to keep calling it abstract.'

Musical historians regard the composition legendary. Why?

'The nature of minimal music is present in it in a very extreme way (the repetition of only one note). But also Chatham was the first person that linked elitist contemporary classical music to experimental punk rock, which then was regarded nonsense, untechnical, and just subversive. So it's a blending of modern youth music (considered low brow) and the majestical art. There are not many comparable cultural revolutionary exempels like this.'

Do you look forward to be on stage with Chatham?

'It's interesting for my carrier as an experimental guitar builder, but I'm a very bad guitar player in fact. Chatham doesn't know this yet, but he will know this Friday. No, strucking an E won't be a problem for me. It is of course a hounor being invited by the organisation to play along, because I enjoy his music for quiet some years. Before I've done a project for Sonic Youth (the Moonlander guitar), that band for me personally stands a bit higher in apprecation. But the sound of Sonic Youth is very much derived from Chatham's work.

Postscript:

Yuri Landman: 'I knew about the mental transcendental aspects of repetitive minimal music and apart from that about the harmonic power of natural overtoning related to unisono tuning and amplification. But what completly blasted my mind and feeling during the performance was the actual psychoacoustical effects appearing during the performance. All musicians attack the strings never 100% at the same time and also all guitars are never tuned exactly the same. This arouses a strange audio effect in the higher overtoning spectrum. I always thought the transcendental aspect of minimal music was just a feeling caused by concentration, but this time it happened automatically. Because of the loud volume you loose control over the actual volume balance of all sounds. You can no longer hear whether the E is louder or the overtone spectrum is louder. The E chord becomes lesser present and the overtones have a huge impact on your consciouness how you percieve the sound and you start to make you own music in this field of harmonic overtone noise in a very easy way. I particularly would like to emphasize the word 'harmonic' in this case, because people might think it's just plain noice you hear, but it is very hypnotic melodic instead of what you might expect. A person out of the audience afterwards described to me he heart choirs singing and this is not very far away from how I perceived the sound. 

Almost yearly I'm having flu. While being sick I've from young age on a repetitive dream about a battle I'm in with constant shifting hallicunations concerning the surroundings, walking in a building that suddenly becomes a wide area becoming round like a planet and reshaping to a big cable I can walk on. Perhaps a similarity with the often-described green tunnel when people have a near death experience. I do not believe in god or live beyond death at all. I'm very averse to linking religion to not yet understanded or scientific prooved phenomenons, so always consider those stories, equal like these dreams, a short circuitry of your nervous system because your body is not in healthy balance. But that critic is off topic. During those dreams I always hear a weird impressive sound. Very hard to describe or imitate with musical instruments. It's a buzzing sound a bit similar to the Spacemen 3 record Dreamweapon: An Evening of Contemporary Sitar Music, but has much more high tones in it, which I now know are the plain overtones from the harmonic series. 

The Cure's Pornography comes a bit close with these overtones especially in Siamese Twins, which triggered me to step into musical research I afterwards called ‘3rd Bridge Helix’. Sonic Youth also managed a similar overtone effect on their records. Only two times in my life I've experienced the presence of physical overtoning spectra which is impossible to hear on recorded music played on a stereo set at a normal volume. You have to be in the actual room to become aware of it and it needs a certain volume level. Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo were able to reach this during performances I've seen. But last Friday Chatham was totally overruling the other two according to this aspect, because he crossed the level of acceptable nice sounding and it was so @#$%^&*! loud!!! But this ear pain had to be there to cause this effect. Chatham's piece therefore represents probably the nearest approximation I've ever heard of the sound appearing in my head during hallucinations.'

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