“ATHANOR” LP vinyl | Rhys Chatham & Nico Guerrero

“Athanor” brings together American composer Rhys Chatham, a pioneering figure of minimalism and post-minimal guitar music, and French composer/guitarist Nico Guerrero in a radical instrumental dialogue conceived as a process of sonic transmutation rather than a conventional collaboration.

Across its extended duration, flutes, electric guitars and altered tunings are fused into a single evolving body of sound. Alto and bass flutes trace slow currents of breath and air, while the electric guitar is stripped of gesture and reconstituted as harmonic clusters, unfolding into dense spectral fields. Later, both guitarists converge into a sustained unison drone, with the Rhys Chatham’s instrument tuned in Pythagorean intonation, generating beating frequencies, pitch friction and widening harmonic instability.

What begins as alignment gradually liquefies, opening into a vortex where resonance overtakes pitch and ghost harmonics surface as autonomous presences.

Rather than developing themes, the music operates through pressure, duration and accumulation. Sound is held inside a closed vessel, heated slowly until its internal structures are forced to reveal themselves. Breath, metal and electricity collapse into a continuous resonant matter, where tone, noise and vibration become interchangeable states. The listener is not positioned outside the music, but drawn into its internal turbulence, navigating thresholds of perception.

Named after the alchemical furnace, Athanor unfolds as a disciplined ritual of transformation. Its esoteric dimension lies in method rather than metaphor; Tuning as cosmology, repetition as incantation, resonance as a means of accessing hidden orders.

The mastering by Australian composer and sound artist Lawrence English acts as the final alchemical seal — refining, amplifying and transmuting the material into a heightened sonic presence, as if an additional layer of invisible fire had been applied.

A music of liminal states, where matter vibrates long enough to disclose what usually remains concealed.

Out on Erototox Decodings (12″ vinyl LP + digital) :
https://rhyschathamnicoguerrero.bandcamp.com/album/athanor