Echo Solo

VINYL FORMAT. By 1989, downtown legend Rhys Chatham had been fusing art music and punk rock for almost 14 years and wanted to try his hand at something else. Accordingly, he set out to combine forms using a diverse vocabulary drawn exclusively from the classic avant-garde. The result is "Echo Solo." In it, Chatham appropriates a number of musical styles -- serial technique, chance operations, and just intonation -- then through a process of amalgamation and superimposition, he transcends their original musical meaning while at the same time imploding it. Only the tiniest pair of critical scissors could isolate the individual elements from the final product; it's a fascinating, paradoxical composition, one that the composer happily describes as "a rite of decimation."