Ancien élève de Tony Conrad, camarade de jeu de Brian Eno, Steve Reich ou Glenn Branca, guitariste maximaliste, trompettiste aventureux et figure nodale de l’avant-garde US, Rhys Chatham s’est entiché d’une poignée de musiciens bernois découverts alors qu’il donnait concert dans la capitale en 2008. Un an plus tard, la formation de circonstance (Mago Flueck à la basse, Julian Sartorius à la batterie, Beat Unternährer au trombone et Reto Mäder aux bruitages) retrouvait le maître pour une session dont cet album est la fixation. Et c’est superbe: des couches de drones sur lesquelles s’accrochent des schémas post-rock, des résurrections krautrock, des accès de dub primitif et le jeu mantrique de Chatham, tout concourt à faire de l’expérience une forme de sabbat lent tout en forces.

One of my all-time favorite Dave Hickey moments in when the rock star art critic describes his first encounter with Andy Warhol, over the course of a remembered “Underground Flick Nite” during his college years in Austin, TX. He and his leftist radical friends had gathered at the Y on the Drag in the hopes of watching burning cars and group sex, but when Warhol’s movie finally came on the big screen, they realized they were all in for a big snooze. What Warhol called “a movie” was in fact nothing but a stationary shot of a guy getting his hair cut: why, Hickey asked, where they sitting there nodding off to the “clip clip clip” of barber shears when people in Third World countries were starving and market capitalism was still waiting to be overthrown?

Over time, however, they realized that this monumentally tedious slice of life was not boring at all; in fact, it was full of action. Microscopic action. Case in point: when, after 7 nearly unendurable minutes of “clip clip clip” and “snip snip snip,” the man in the barber chair suddenly reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette, it was as though the whole barber shop had exploded. And the theater along with it. “It was stupid,” Hickey recalls, “but it was miraculous too. His film had totally recalibrated the perceptions of a roomful of sex-crazed adoloescent revolutionaries into a field of tiny increments.”

Now Andy Warhol was not a minimalist by any stretch of the imagination, but I think that Hickey’s anecdote goes a long way toward capturing that movement’s psychological effects. Basically, you take something that is really simple (1=1), repeat it over and over again (1+1=2), and realize that you were wrong about it in the first place, because everything that seems simple is actually extraordinarily complex (1+1+1+1=∞). Composer Rhys Chatham has almost always worked inside this equation, though he is perhaps best known for taking this “field of tiny increments” and blowing it up to the monumental proportions of rock and roll. “Guitar Trio” (1977) his first major composition, plugged repetition à la Morton Subotnik and La Monte Young into the squall of an electric guitar. And since he relocated from New York to Paris twenty years ago, Chatham’s signature wall of sound seems to be getting bigger and bigger: “Crimson Grail,” which made its American debut at Lincoln Center in New York last August, boasted the combined decibel power of 200 electric guitars, and 15 basses–and 400 guitars and 30 basses when he mounted the piece at the Sacré Couer in Paris, two years prior.

It is sad, I know, but when you are a music blogger, sometimes you simply don’t have the luxury of planting yourself on a bean cushion, closing your eyes, and dreamily contemplating an entire album from start to finish–even if you have been waiting for that album to show up in your mailbox for months. Life just gets way too busy. And that is why when I received The Bern Project a few days ago from Hinterzimmer Records in Switzerland, I vowed that I would allow myself to give Rhys’ new album a spin only if I took a crack at the mountain of dirty dishes in my kitchen sink while listening to it. So I cranked my stereo up to full volume, turned on the tap, and prayed that the mechanical nature of the activity would allow me to devote my full attention to the listening at hand.

To speak only in terms of its one-sheet, The Bern Project has all the trappings of a minor Guitar Trio side project; following a performance of the piece in 2008, Chatham returned to the Swiss capital to record some material with percussionist Julian Sartorius (”one of the most sought-after improv drummers in Switzerland”), bassist Mago Fluek (a key player in Bern’s garage rock scene), and trombonist Beat Unternährer. Labelman Retro Mäder recorded the sessions on a multi-track, selected the best takes, and joined in the creative process by combining elements from different improvisations to form original tracks (though this is not the case with all the pieces that made it into the final master). As I lathered up my sponge and settled into the album’s opening drone–a twelve-minute trumpet solo (Chatham) alternating between the bass of elephant flatulence and the treble of a thousand buzzing bees–I seriously wasn’t expecting anything all that punked out. Even if the infinity of flickering overtones that was slowly washing over the room wasn’t all that far off from what I had heard him extract from his famous “guitar armies.”

But listening to minimalist music is all about allowing things to creep up on you; and “War in Heaven” certainly did just that. Just as I was plunging my coffee pot into the bath of hot water, Sartorious chimed in with a loud resounding thump. And then another one. Before I knew it, the drone–with all its dancing harmonics–was being molded into something like a melody. A bass line was telling us where each phrase began and ended, and a pan-flute was covering the whole thing in a breathy gauze. Thump thump. Suddenly Sartorious exploded into a full-on Kraut beat–fills and all–and the trombone multiplied into several.

And guess what? Doing the dishes–something I had been putting off for almost a week–suddenly became interesting. Extraordinarily so. The bubbles were flashing in brilliant rainbows, spoons were swimming in synchronized formations, and I was dancing though the mundane motions of my chore like I haven’t danced since college. A drone really COULD be the stuff rock and roll. And if Guitar Trio had shown the world that the Ramones were closet minimalists, this stuff was showing me that Klaus Dinger and Kosmick coterie were actually minimalists, too. Funk–cool and sexy as ever–was dancing its way right out the womb, into to the tomb, and off to oblivion.

Rather than bore you with a track-by-track description of The Bern Project, let me just say that each of its chapters packs just as potent a slow-burn. Do not let the academic pedigree scare you off. Just go out and buy this record for yourself, put it in your CD player (if you still have one), and make sure you crank it up loud enough for your landlord to grow a bit worried about all the “fun” you seem to be having. Clip Clip.