Rafiq Bhatia And Chris Pattishall Release ‘Each Dream, A Melting Door’ EP Today
Today, longtime friends Rafiq Bhatia and Chris Pattishall have 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 last solo release, 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” (The 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*, featuring Florence Pugh, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and David Harbour. Previously, Bhatia and the band earned Oscar and BAFTA nominations for their head-spinning Everything Everywhere All At Once score, on which they collaborated with David Byrne, André Benjamin, and Mitski.
On Blue, Bhatia’s collaboration with Cannes Palm 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 twenty-minute work set to selections from Bhatia’s 2020 EP, Standards Vol. I. Since its release, Bhatia has continued to deepen his engagement with jazz, appearing alongside Ambrose Akinmusire, Dave Douglas, Ganavya, James Brandon Lewis, and Samora Pinderhughes in addition to producing arresting debut records for Pattishall and trumpeter Riley Mulherkar.
Each Dream provides a first snapshot of who Bhatia has become in the wake of these experiences. The experience of working with Weerasethakul had a profound effect on Bhatia, broadening the sense of space and scale in Bhatia’s work and redoubling his fascination with the particulars of stillness. In a recorded first for Bhatia, 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, booming subsonics, storms of noise and melodic waves that combust and fragment.
An erudite pianist championed early in his career by the likes of Wynton Marsalis, Pattishall has long held a fascination with production and sound design, dating back to the days twenty years ago when he and Bhatia first started hanging out and listening to ‘Madvillainy’. More recently Pattishall has quietly developed his own electroacoustic approach, culminating most recently in co-producing (alongside Bhatia) Riley Mulherkar’s head-turning debut album, ‘Riley’, and co-scoring (alongside Samora Pinderhughes) the Emmy-winning Nikki Giovanni documentary, Going to Mars. On ‘Each Dream’, Pattishall distills 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 like Knives Out and Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, Pattishall builds a treatise of possibilities that the piano can offer in a layered, sonically driven setting.
Tomorrow night Bhatia and Pattishall will give the EP’s debut performance at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, with a second show the following night in Philadelphia at the Penn Live Arts’s Harold Prince Theatre.