Rhys Chatham composed "Guitar Trio Is My Life" in 1977, a New York’s propagation across a single guitar string that blends the "unstratified" minimalism by Tony Conrad and the guitar army which was already working in those years Glenn Branca also. Thirty years after the Radium, section of the Table of Elements, published a 3-CD box set titled Guitar Trio Is My Life, which contains the same composition played several times (with change of speed or vehemence) by members of a patchwork of groups, from Sonic Youth to Tortoise, from Hüsker Dü to Silver Mt Zion. Exaggeration? You can bet, but a wonderful exaggeration: Guitar Trio is an invention of an indefinite, infinite growing, that seems to anticipate beyond every chord a change that never happens or that happens without a coup d'Etat.
The three CDs box set contain the repetition of the same no wave style mantra guitar, deleting the bitter cynicism of that genre in the maximalist, epic, and enthusiastic suspension. And then yes, we shall and must say that this composition also contributed significantly to create an aesthetic form of which many were children, by the already referred Sonic Youth to Godspeed You Black Emperor!, but we deliberately say it only at the end, distracted and without stopping too much mesmerized by the music that does not change and by the size of this work. Three CDs are indeed many and I would recommend this challenging purchase only for the fans of Chatham, also for the beautiful booklet with unpublished photos accompanying the casket.
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