Longtime friends Rafiq Bhatia and Chris Pattishall have today released their first musical collaboration, the five-song EP ‘Each Dream, A Melting Door’.
Unfurling seamlessly like a short film, Bhatia and Pattishall improvise sculptural, sleepwalking music that rewards deep listening, illuminating fleeting pathways towards the journey inward. Listen to it HERE.
In the five years since his previous solo EP, ‘Standards Vol. 1’, Bhatia has only deepened his status as “one of the most intriguing figures in music today, who refuses to be pinned to one genre, culture or instrument” (New York Times), collaborating with a beguiling breadth of artists with little in common other than their iconoclastic outputs. As a member of the experimental pop outfit Son Lux, it was recently announced that Bhatia would be co-scoring the new Marvel Studios film ‘Thunderbolts*’, starring Florence Pugh, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and David Harbour. Previously, Bhatia and the band earned Oscar and BAFTA nominations for their head-spinning score to ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’, on which they collaborated with David Byrne, André Benjamin, and Mitski.
‘On Blue’, Bhatia’s collaboration with Cannes Palme d’Or winning director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, was recently performed live by Alarm Will Sound during back-to-back nights at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, while the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater internationally toured a 20 minute work set to selections from ‘Standards Vol. 1’. Since that 2020 release, Bhatia has continued to deepen his engagement with jazz, appearing alongside Ambrose Akinmusire, Dave Douglas, Ganavya, James Brandon Lewis and Samora Pinderhughes, while also producing arresting debut records for Pattishall and trumpeter Riley Mulherkar.
‘Each Dream, A Melting Door’ provides a snapshot of who Bhatia has become in the wake of these experiences. Working with Weerasethakul had a profound effect on him, broadening the sense of space and scale in his work and redoubling a fascination with the particulars of stillness. In a recorded first for him, the music on ‘Each Dream…’ is largely improvised, unfolding like a single live performance with multiple tracks captured within a few takes by engineer Todd Carder.
New technological integrations have allowed Bhatia to merge his last decade of development as an electroacoustic composer back into his practice as an improvising guitarist, using real-time sampling and manipulation to express and develop multiple worlds of sound at once. As a result, it’s easy to forget that everything audible on this EP besides the piano is…guitar. Forwards and in reverse, up and down the octaves, Bhatia multiplies the sound of the instrument, transfiguring it into an orchestra of whistling wind tunnels and booming subsonics, with storms of noise and melodic waves that combust and fragment.
An erudite pianist championed early in his career by the likes of Wynton Marsalis, Chris Pattishall has long held a fascination with production and sound design, dating back to the days two decades ago when he and Bhatia first started hanging out and listening to ‘Madvillainy’. More recently he has quietly developed his own electroacoustic approach, culminating most recently in co-producing (alongside Bhatia) Riley Mulherkar’s head-turning ‘Riley’ and co-scoring (alongside Samora Pinderhughes) the Emmy-winning Nikki Giovanni documentary ‘Going to Mars’.
EACH DREAM, A MELTING DOOR
TRACKLISTING
1 Occlusion
2 Vanta
3 Supplicant
4 Ijen
5 The Voice Of Love
On ‘Each Dream…’, Pattishall distils that experience back into his approach to his instrument, turning in some of his most understatedly profound pianism to date. Advancing precedents from his playing on film scores such as ‘Knives Out’ and Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Nightmare Alley’, he builds a treatise of possibilities that the piano can offer in a layered, sonically driven setting.
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