Rhys Chatham is a composer, guitarist and trumpet player from Manhattan, currently living in Paris, who altered the DNA of rock and created a new type of urban music by fusing the overtone-drenched minimalism of the early 60s with the relentless, elemental fury of the Ramones — the textural intricacies of the avant-garde colliding with the visceral punch of electric guitar-slinging punk rock. Starting with Guitar Trio in the 1970s and culminating with A Crimson Grail for 200 electric guitars in 2009, Chatham has been working for over 30 years to make use of armies of electric guitars in special tunings to merge the extended-time music of the sixties and seventies with serious hard rock. Parallel with his rock-influenced pieces, Chatham has been working with various brass configurations since 1982, and recently has developed a completely new approach with collaborations, improvised and compositional pieces involving trumpet through performances and recordings that started in 2009. Chatham's trumpet work deploys extended playing techniques inherited from the glory days the early New York minimalist and free jazz period. He is currently working on a series of fully-notated compositions for an ensemble of 6 electric guitars, electric bass and drums, the first of which is entitled Harmonie du soir, to be released in November 2013 on Northern-SpyRecords. Further releases are expected in 2014. Recording and performing for the first time after 30 years, Chatham and Charlemagne Palestine have a reunited collaborative recording to be released on the European based label, Sub-Rosa. Rhys has another special collaboration with Brooklyn/Boston based band Oneida which has evolved since 2012. Their first collaborative record will be released on Northern-Spy Records in the fall of 2014. Chatham continues to write for his orchestras of 100-200 electric guitars. A performance of A Secret Rose, his latest composition for 100 guitars, was performed in the San Francisco Bay area November 2013.