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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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"Radiantly beautiful acoustic guitar music of the adventurous variety."
(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."
