Oneida / Rhys Chatham - What's Your Sign?

Pitchfork 78

Through most of What’s Your Sign?, the new album by veteran maximalist composer Rhys Chatham and Brooklyn DIY drone-blasters Oneida, Chatham takes only minimal steps into the spotlight. Perhaps inverting the usual super-session logic, Chatham’s guitar and trumpet blend convincingly into Oneida’s 15-year-running noisenik dynamic, while the quintet channel the power of Chatham’s work. The 35-minute LP never achieves the epic scale that both can work at—Chatham with his armies of up to 400 guitarists, Oneida via their rigorous eight-hour-straight Ocropolis performances—but each of the six tracks generates a be-here-now flash of present-tense psychedelia, hallucinations by way of overtones and volume.

Missing a monumental centerpiece, What's Your Sign? comes closest with the nine-minute “Well Tuned Guitar,” its title referencing the microtonal work of Chatham’s one-time teacher, the psychedelic minimalist La Monte Young. Building towards slashing chords—and Chatham’s big spotlight—the drama draws from the rhythmic language Chatham has been refining since 1977’s “Guitar Trio,” written after seeing the Ramones at CBGB. It’s perhaps the only place the pairing doesn’t completely click. In the hands of Oneida, while still sounding convincingly enormous, the approach also feels slightly contained, as if following a map instead of the terrain itself. Oneida’s semi-formalist mind-exploding can be heard more vividly on the disc-opening “You Get Brighter,” an exercise in forward motion driven by drummer Kid Millions, a propulsion that seems as if it could keep expanding outwards forever. Chatham’s guitar bends and freaks with the rest of the Oneida brahs, his voice adding to the song’s one-line refrain, both a signpost and conductor’s baton.

Oneida sometimes function more like a liquid light show than a traditional rock band. They most often concern themselves with a swirl of repetition, the type of music where—watching live—it’s not always possible to tell who is making what sound, perhaps not even for those playing in the band, either. Chatham and Oneida’s music feels most natural in these places, using the change of texture as a form of a movement. On a pair of drumless jams, “Bad Brains” and “The Mabinogian,” the music never stops pressing into the unknown, the driving pulse only heard in the negative space between oscillations. The music itself could be coming from any combination of the three guitarists and two keyboardists, a free improv counterpoint to the full-throttle rhythmic spectacles heard elsewhere.

The balance of What's Your Sign? makes it feel like an Oneida album, built on power and cosmic eruptions. Besides the Positions EP (featuring a driving cover of This Heat's “S.P.Q.R.”), it’s the band’s first proper release in four years. In the interim, they’ve transformed even more fully into a live act; in 2013, a 48-minute set-opening incarnation of “You Get Brighter” did almost expand outwards forever. Besides the touch of Chatham’s compositional hand on “Well Tuned Guitar,” What's Your Sign? is another sliver of Oneida’s ever-jamming life, a place both unpredictable and consistent, where collaborators like Chatham might arrive and make themselves at home. Even tracks that start out sounding nothing like Oneida fall easily into the band’s gravity well. On “A. Phillip Randolph at Back Bay Station,” after Chatham strikes a gentle keynote with layered flute, the band quickly lifts into a group glide over a rolling snare drum sea.

Chatham’s trumpet loops finally break through and take over the four minutes of the album-closing “Civil Weather.” It’s a mode that one wouldn’t expect to find Oneida exploring, more Jon Hassell-like Fourth World bliss than kosmiche fire music, a trumpet clearing a central path down the middle of Oneida space. But in plenty of other ways—sure, why not? It’s a new place they find together, the kind of spot they might get to for a few minutes one night when the tapers didn’t make it out, and then never try again. With more than one What’s Your Sign? track fading to delighted in-studio laughter, it’s only a surprise when it ends so soon.