reviews

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"It is precisely by centring that spectrality that Chris Rainier manages to move beyond it. As his title suggests, Partch's body is the object rather than the subject this time: it is Partch in/by/through Rainier we are hearing. The seven tracks collected on this vinyl (visually no less a thing of beauty than its sound; all of his albums are labours of love: it's hardly a surprise) comprise an equally idiosyncratic snapshot. Partch's most famous work comes first – Barstow, his catalogue of hitchhiker graffiti from the Mojave Overflow Bridge – but the rest are an assemblage of deep cuts, first arrangements and forgotten detritus. On tracks like 'The Intruder' – a yearning whisper, hardly a minute long but played with the aching fragility of one singing himself asleep alone beneath the stars – the mythic Partch of massed percussive fame seems impossibly far removed. Emphasising not the heady microtonal theory or the precision of his scores but rather the cigarette sighs of a fatigued voice and the ambient noise of a stray fingertip, Rainier unconceals Partch as what he perhaps was all along: a folk musician belonging steadfastly to the great legacy of Americana. Classical music has got him figured wrong; this is music that passes between imperfect bodies by way of campfire smoke and co!ee, by dirty fingernails and sea spray, more familiar to Elizabeth Cotten than Tristan Murail. Math only ever served a rugged naturalism for Partch: here, perhaps for the first time since his death, this music feels natural again.

And so while Rainier's is an uncommonly assured and rigorous interpretation, the inevitable interrogations of fidelity – of a mimicry measurable against the real Harry Partch – are superfluous. The album is not a document of likeness (though Rainier has kept Partch's endearingly pragmatic habit of introducing every title as it arrives; it becomes him well), nor does it capitulate to the promised deference of a ‘portrait album’. The 'Harry Partch' in the title is not a person but a kind of place, a resonant chamber set deep within the recesses of Rainier's own body, carved from years of admiration and a!ectionate attention, where his own voice mixes with archival dust in odd and enchanting sprays of light and memory. It is true in-habitance we hear, a body both utterly inseparable from Rainier's artistic sensibility and yet impossible to recall without destroying. The same is also true for Partch: this interior place in Rainier – and in each of us who forms a bond with his music – is the elusive site of his continued, inaccessible habitation.

Chris Rainier Sings the Music of Harry Partch is thus an act of mourning. It is a devastating and unbearably detailed account of intimacy's uncanny occupation, of the too close proximity a living musician knits with his unaware, ahistorical other. Rainier's anfractuous Adapted Guitar traces out the curving architecture of this cenotaph, but we never hear it except in glimpses. What we hear instead is the care, the gentle responsibility with which Rainier traverses and invokes without desecration the unknowable space of the other within (every act of mourning being, after all, the work of love).

Chris Rainier and Soosan Lolavar both stand to have inherited the utopian vision of musicianship Partch himself etched out back in 1940. His dream for the artist daring enough to venture beyond the ‘safe cathedral of modern music’ for the ‘little-known country of subtle tones’ – as both of them have – was one of too many bodies, of restless and transient inhabitance (from his essay ‘Patterns of Music’):

'The zealot driving into this wilderness should have more than one life to give: one to create instruments within the tyranny of the five-fingered hand, to play the tones they find; one that will wrestle with notation and theory, so that they can make a record of what they find... still another that will create and re-create significant music for their new-old instruments and in their new-old media; and, finally, another that will perform it, give it – as a revelation – to the general wealth of human culture.'

That both Rainier and Lolavar have given us of their wilderness is revelation indeed. Both albums are testimonies, documents of a distinctly modern and critical relationship to place, ownership and authority that takes as beautiful precisely that which destabilises the power of singularity. As in the Derrida quote that opened this review, every habitation contains the exile and loss of another inside it. To listen to either record – as I still recommend you do – is to attend to the impossible invocation of that exiled space, to hear the distant resonance of the invisible other whose exteriority is forever buried deep within. 

(Ty Bouque, TEMPO Volume 78 Issue 310, Cambridge University Press, 18.12.2024)


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"However, the four musicians of Scordatura Ensemble/The Amsterdam Partch Project presented a vindication of the American composer and inventor from an even more unusual perspective: early pieces in preparations (by the composer himself) for very few instruments...The result, right from the initial 1942 work The Rose , is a strange and delightful piece of music that intertwines popular genres like pop, country, and crooning techniques. All of this is enriched by the microtonal scales of the Chromelodeon (a type of prepared harmonium played by Reinier van Houdt). Dark Brother was one of the most intense pieces, at the antipodes of technology, a child, as was its creator, Partch, of the Great American Depression. It featured the austere voice of Chris Rainier, as well as the enormous kithara played by Alfrun Schmid, brought along with the rest of the instrumental on a long road trip from the Netherlands."

(Translated from the Spanish ~ review by Ismael G. Cabral in Scherzo, 28.04.2025)

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(Alexandra Epstein, The Fretboard Journal, 28.07.23)
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(Jim Marks, Dusted Magazine, 27.03.23)


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"Composer and do-it-yourselfer Aart Strootman recreated a number of Partch instruments for Scordatura, such as the mighty Bass Marimba and the tinkling Diamond Marimba. Together with the Kithara, a human-sized Greek lyre, and adapted guitars and viola, they enable Scordatura to recreate Partch's unique sound world: windblown, pseudo-ritualistic folk songs, voiced by guitarist-singer Chris Rainier, but also the beautiful, completely acoustic cityscape San Francisco - a setting of the cries of two newsboys on a foggy night in the Twenties."


(Translated from the Dutch, Joep Stapel, NRC Handelsblad, 01.09.2021)

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"man and the echo’s opening song, “a lone lutheal”, starts with a simple four note progression, the recording of which is distant. Twenty seconds in, the sound expands and fills the room. Twenty seconds later, the progression stops abruptly and is follow by a few strums, the last of which disintegrates in a slow natural fade. The music is played on a “replica of a 1927 Weissenborn style 1 hourglass lap steel guitar,” loaded with experimental tunings and altered by various /preparations'. It is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard.

 

The album’s second song is “but first, the iron cow must sweat.” A bit more complex than the opener, not due to acrobatics or dexterity, but because the song deals with odd tones and layers. 'machachara' is the title of the third song. It comes with a sound that builds on what’s come before sliding into new worlds...Here are a few reference points, the first of which comes from Chris Rainier's biography, the rest I am pulling from my ears: Harry Partch, Eric Dolphy’s Out To Lunch, Godspeed You Black Emperor, any gamelan album produced by David Lewiston, John Fahey, The Waikiki’s “Remember Boa Boa,” John Cage, Ted Falconi.

 

Chris Rainier was born in South Africa, grew up in Melbourne, Australia, and lives in England. He studied music in Melbourne, where he earned a Master’s degree studying the work of genius composer and instrument-maker Harry Partch and exploring microtones, the notes between notes between notes between notes. Rainier pulls more than microtones from Partch. Like Harry Partch, Rainier is wholly interested in the instruments he plays. His work explores the totality of an instrument. In a prior recording, Rainier deconstructed a Dobro guitar. On man and the echo, the focus is the Weissenborn lap steel guitar. Actually, the guitar is not just the focus, it is the base of everything - because everything comes from the guitar, Rainier is able to use treatments, preparations, effects and loops in a way that never overwhelms the music. He is so successful at grounding his work in his instrument that the extracurriculars are often invisible. Rainier accomplishes this by smart playing and technique.

 

Rainier is a flawless player, but not a perfect one. There are 'mistakes' in the songs, botched notes, strings struck off, inconsistencies, which all exist in context and flow seamlessly in sound. There is nothing worried about Rainier’s music, no regrets or embarrassment, nothing self-conscious. It is humbly brilliant stuff. Until late last year, I hadn’t heard of Chris Rainier. My introduction of his work came through a social media record selling group. A record freak posted that Rainier had ten copies of man and the echo for sale. He added that the original pressing of 250 had long been sold out, with copies selling for up to $75. Rainier was asking no more than he did when the album came out. We were told that we’d be crazy if we missed out on one of the best experimental guitar records ever made. I went to Rainier’s Bandcamp page, listened to a couple of songs and ordered a copy.

 

A few weeks later, man and the echo arrived. I put it in my “listen now” pile, which meant that it sat in a stack for a couple more weeks. When I put it on and dropped needle, I was floored. Not only was the music unlike anything I’d heard, but the recording is one of the best. The packaging is fantastic. Rainier, who released this himself, cares about every aspect of his music and it shows. Everything about man and the echo is great. This is not only a high compliment but it is a stunning achievement for a vinyl record made in the 21st century, when too many half-assed charlatans, money-grubbing stooges, and feckless amateurs record, manufacture and release records. It is rare that someone in the process of record making – the artist, label, mastering engineer, plater, or presser – doesn’t cut corners or fuck up the process. man and the echo is an achievement."


(Scott Soriano, Music Time, 24.08.2020)


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"I was taken by surprise that Chris Rainier sings on this album. His previous work was mainly avant-garde compositions, Weissenborn slide guitar and ambient soundscapes...but ZOZOBRA is more like an unplugged session of Sonic Youth playing Harry Partch."

(Marcus Obst, Dying for Bad Music, 25.02.2019)
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"He keeps enough of the instrument's essential sound up front to make you aware of the musical and conceptual ground that he covers each time he splits a luau-worthy tone into a bouquet of blooming loops or lets it unspool into a puddle of tape."

(Bill Meyer, Dusted Magazine, 22.03.16)
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(Jason Kennedy, Hi Fi +, Issue 126, August '15)
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"Radiantly beautiful acoustic guitar music of the adventurous variety."

(Jason Kennedy, @EditorTheEar, 23.06.15)
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(Rob Turner, The Wire, Issue 374, April '15)

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"This is a guitar lover’s album. An opportunity to experience the possibilities of guitar music, freed from genres and allowed to exist as a wild animal of its own accord...All in all it’s remarkable progressive music contained in a remarkable package. It’s that simple."

(Bob Baker Fish, Cyclic Defrost, 27.02.15)
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"Notable is the superb quality of the recording! Crystal clear and very well balanced, like sitting next to him or better inside his instrument! The microtonality of every scratch and plug of the strings is reproduced in its full spectrum."

(Marcus Obst, Dying for Bad Music, 03.03.2015)
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"Rainier’s soulful performance of these little-known works by Partch is the most engaging and seamless combination of research and performance I have ever witnessed on a concert stage." 

(Matthew Lorenzon, Partial Durations / RealTime, 23.12.13)
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