The sound of 400 electric guitars massed together in the biggest cathedral in Paris. That's the sound that New York composer Rhys Chatham is known for. What do you do after you've written massed symphonies for hundreds of electric guitars? Well, you get back down to basics, that's what! And this is what Rhys is going to do in collaboration with Angie Eng in their new collaborative work, Echodes.

During the nineties Rhys played trumpet with drum n bass grooves, releasing albums with Martin Wheeler on Ninja Tune, and with Pat Thomas and DJ Apache 66 on the Wire Editions, putting the trumpet through heavy distortion and effects. After taking some time off on trumpet to write two new pieces for 100+ electric guitar armies, Rhys has returned to the scene as a trumpet player.

The trumpet sound is an amalgamation between Don Cherry's free way of playing combined with Jon Hassell's modal and rhythmic approach, all adding up to a sound that's as fresh as early morning baked bread in Paris. Expect down tempo, flexistential insanity, side by side with hard driving stoner rhythms and the sweet sound of screaming black metal riffs morphed into hydrogen jukebox delay trumpet.

With Chatham, Eng bases the visuals upon spiritual symbols and cultural rituals such as the Spanish bull fight superimposed inside tarot cards. Mini false narratives are constructed with live hand manipulation of rocks, thread, feathers and mixed with footage of owls and chopped up graphics of Hebrew, Burmese and Tifinah.

Much like Nam June Paik and 60's experimental cinema which expanded video as an instrument, Eng strays away from film narrative and focuses on psychological states and   emotional gestures.   What Apollonaire did with visual poetry, how Cornell put mysticism in a box, and like Artaud's protests to purify theatre into a gesture-diagram, Eng recreates a type of enigmatic cinema of flickers, jump cuts, flying objects all too human to ignore.

at le Coord, Paris October 2009