#che chen

[brownwork]

Tokyo 17.II.2012, by Che Chen

1 track album

Che has a new solo violin recording up for your pleasure...

[dustedmagazine]

75 Dollar Bill — I Was Real (Thin Wrist)

I Was Real by 75 Dollar Bill

75 Dollar Bill’s potent blend of juke-joint boogie, Sahel shredding, stern NYC minimalism, and experimental wonkery reached an apotheosis on Wood/Metal/Plastic/Pattern/Rhythm/Rock, four slabs of art-school party jams that were as groovy, jagged, heavy, hard, soft, abrasive, smooth, austere and warm as sandstone. Their new LP, the sprawling I Was Real, doesn’t add anything to the sound they perfected on W/M/P/P/R/R. Rather, I Was Real deconstructs, re-examines and re-assembles it. It’s a career summary, victory lap and puzzle box from of one of America’s most interesting bands. 

I Was Real’s biggest surprises are formal and structural, not sonic. Nearly every prior permutation of 75 Dollar Bill, from guitar/percussion duo to septet appears on I Was Real, and their studio-as-instrument experiments have become more refined. Captivating opener “Every Last Coffee or Tea,” (a wonderful full band re-recording of a track from their first cassette) segues into “C. OR. T.- Verso,” three minutes of scraping noise constructed from the “Every Last Coffee or Tea” intro. Another one: the suite of “I. New New II. The Worm III. Like Laundry,” where a slinky guitar/double bass number is swallowed up in its prime by a taut drone whose tonal center shifts imperceptibly over the course of four minutes before fading into the moody guitar/percussion duet “Like Laundry” (not to be confused with “Like Like Laundry,” another early piece). Best of these experiments is “WZN#3-Verso,” which consists of roiling, rumbling viola, violin, Casio, guitar, saxophone and bass recorded as overdubs for the closing track, “WZN#3” (another re-recording), but left to fend for themselves.

Here’s the best part about “WZN#3-Verso”: it’s a swelling wave, rolling thunder, one of I Was Real’s most exciting moments and you don’t need to know anything about its construction to enjoy it. All that stuff about overdubs and everything else in the last paragraph is for record nerds, Discogs ogres, formalists, and critics. Yes, 75 Dollar Bill makes music by and for music geeks, but at their best, as they often are on I Was Real, they also make thrillingly direct body music, rooted in tradition and totally far out, the sort of avant-democratic jive that Henry Flynt’s bands never quite nailed. You don’t need to show your underground credentials and identify who “Tetuzi Akiyama” is to get lost in its massive stomp, the blurring boundaries of the guitar and sax’s taffy-like timbres and the way they trade off melodic fragments, fulfilling James Brown’s apocryphal dictum, “Every instrument a drum!” Even the side long faux-raga of the title track is rhythmic and sly enough to, like all good meditations, engage body and brain in equal measure. Truly weird, but never experimental for its own sake, I Was Real is just accessible enough that Bo Diddley, RL Burnside, Chen’s one time tutor Jeiche Ould Chigaly, and your world music/blues loving parents might grudgingly dig it. 

At 69 minutes, I Was Real is a lot to take in. Newcomers are advised to start with W/M/P/P/R/R, the concise, big band counterpart to I Was Real’s occasionally meandering chamber music. Still, I Was Real is sure to puzzle and please whether your devotion to rock and roll and its antecedents is intellectual or physical. Sure, all of that stuff about Mauritanian modes, compound rhythms, and microtones is interesting, but when “Every Last Coffee or Tea” levitates you, all that matters is the music: strange, familiar, stark, funky and new under the sun. 

Isaac Olson

[brownwork]

We’re excited to have so many great people playing during our week of Social Music at Troost starting Sunday the 23rd.  Chad Taylor, Patrick Holmes, David Watson, Sue Garner, Talice Lee, Jim Pugliese, Chris Nelson, Roe Enney, Ira Kaplan, Willie Klein, William Parker, Hamid Drake, Daniel Carter, Andres Jimenez, Andres Fonseca, Carolina Oliveros, Gabriel Benavides, Roxane Kasegari, Julissa Maldonado, Melody Feo, Juan Jimenez, Julián Gomez, Felice Rosser, Paddy Boom, Nao Hakamada and Yasi Perera!

[brownwork]

Episode 159, Che Chen

One half of the stellar band 75 Dollar Bill, Che Chen is a multi-instrumentalist and concert organizer based in Queens New York. This Wednesday , he will premiere a new piece at Roulette in Brooklyn. Ahead of the performance, Che stopped by talk about a broad range of topics: stud

You can learn a lot about Che from this cool conversation with Jeremiah Cymerman (and a bit about Jeremiah himself).

[dustedmagazine]

Che Chen & Robbie Lee — The Spectrum Does (Audiomer)

Familiarity, novelty and antiquity entwine to make something rare on The Spectrum Does. You have probably already heard Robbie Lee and Che Chen in other settings. Lee co-runs Telegraph Harp records and writes/plays/sings in Creative Automatic; he’s also a utility player who has joined the bands of Baby Dee, Neil Hagerty, Brightblack Morning Light, Cass McCombs and Talibam! Chen, of course, plays guitar in 75 Dollar Bill, but has also made records on his own and with Tetuzi Akiyama and Chie Mukai. And for about five years, Chen and Lee had a partnership that encompassed intense wood shedding, a bit of playing out, one prior LP and a tour and record with Jozef Van Wissem under the banner Heresy of the Free Spirit.

Chen and Lee first got together to play bass clarinet duos. That early practice of playing the same instrument probably has something to do with the ego-less cohesion of their music, but there was no way they’d stick to just one instrument. Lee collects ancient instruments and Chen is also a multi-instrumentalist; no doubt Van Wissem was drawn to them because they not only played portative organ, bass recorder and harmonium, but improvised non-idiomatically with those instruments.  

The Spectrum Does is drawn from two performances that took place in 2011, one at Issue Project Room and the other at Glasslands. On side one Lee comes out swinging, blowing his taragato like Peter Brötzmann (the Eastern European reed instrument’s main contemporary proponent) was looking over his shoulder. Chen responds to his tough, tunneling lines with coarse, choppy fiddle scrapes that sound like Tony Conrad playing the way a traffic cop talks until their abraded timbres fall together and then subside into a machine-like whir. Next, delay-distorted sounds rise and retreat from a carpet of harmonium, turning the vibe both prayerful and apprehensive. Then the violin returns, still Conrad-like, but Lee counters with a slow, pastoral melody played on a great bass recorder.  

Some improvisers might keep duking it out, but Chen switches to bass recorder himself. Whether they relate aggressively or passively, even when you can tell who is playing what, that seems to matter less than the consonance of mood and uncertainty of century that they create together — there are passages where it sounds like some Hungarian goat herder from the 1760s is playing with some turtlenecked freaks in a 1960s NYC art loft via a time portal held open by vibrantly fluttering magnetic tape.  There’s really nothing else around that sounds like this stuff, and it’s a shame that the duo is done, but we have another piece of analog magic to tell you what they sounded like — this fine record.  

Bill Meyer

[brownwork]

[brownwork]

The “froots” of a nice conversation Che and I had w/Steve Hunt earlier this year in London.  (from fROOTS magazine #413, Nov. 2017,   http://www.frootsmag.com/content/issue/list/413/ )

[brownwork]

75 Dollar Bill on the banks of the Ohio.  At Cropped Out Festival 2017