Tusk Festival 2015 — Rhys Chatham

After 5 years, we've finally broken our 'no repeats' rule. Rhys Chatham played the very first TUSK Festival in 2011 and gave us what remains one of the most joyous TUSK moments to date in the performance of his legendary Guitar Trio piece; leading a carefully recruited local group of drummer, bass and 8 guitarists, Rhys led from the front in a masterpiece demonstration of ecstasy in repetition. And we're delighted to have Rhys back with us this year, this time taking a very different approach and delving back to his more minimal approaches to electronic drones. As is well documented, Rhys came originally from a more classical persuasion and had an epiphany seeing The Ramones in New York in the early 70s and its not hard to pinpoint throughout his career how he's merged the two worlds he found himself straddling, creating grand experiments in composition and theory but all built with a decidedly No Wave toolbox. Rhys will also feature in one of the weekend's first-time collaborations, thrown together with two other unfettered musical polymaths Oren Ambarchi and Sam Shalabi. We couldn't be more excited about this, to us this is a group line-up direct from Fantasy Island.