Avant-garde Guitarist Rafiq Bhatia Announces New EP In Collaboration With Pianist Chris Pattishall
His first new music in five years, Rafiq Bhatia is announcing a new EP today created in collaboration with pianist Chris Pattishall. Titled ‘Each Dream, A Melting Door’, Bhatia and Pattishall improvise across the EP’s five tracks to conjure environments of sound that evolve at nature’s pace—but crucially—also carry its unpredictable stakes. Unfurling seamlessly like a short film, the result is sculptural, sleepwalking music that rewards patience and deep listening, illuminating fleeting pathways towards the journey inward.
With today’s announcement they share closing track "The Voice of Love”, their take on Angelo Badalementi’s haunting piece originally written for Twin Peaks - Fire Walk with Me and transcribed by Pattishall directly from Badalementi’s hand. Even more prescient with Twin Peaks creator David Lynch’s passing last week, the song has a hushed, elegiac opening that gives way to a throbbing, ecstatic energy—manic and calm at once, it’s a beguilingly transcendent statement.
“David Lynch was always searching,” explains Bhatia, reflecting on one of his primary artistic influences. “Rather than treating abstraction as some sort of stuffy, elitist realm, he saw it as a way to invite us all in, recognizing that ambiguity can make space for each of us to more fully embody our own experience. He spoke out against the toxic notion of the tortured artist, reminding us time and again that art flows most easily from a place of health, curiosity, playfulness, and patience. He emphasized that art need not reflect the artist, but seemed to also understand that in certain ways it always and inevitably will.”
“The timing of this release—which was set months ago—feels uncanny, not to mention the fact that it was a video that circulated on the day of Angelo Badalamenti's passing that first inspired us to record this piece. Ultimately, I'm grateful that we already have a plan in place to honor our hero.”
Listen to “Voice of Love”: https://youtu.be/Ljvl0fGUBXA?si=-t3AkmojVZuFD2cc
‘Each Dream, A Melting Door’ is Bhatia’s first solo release since co-scoring 2023’s Academy Award-winning Best Picture Everything Everywhere All At Once with his bandmates in Son Lux, where they earned Oscar and BAFTA nominations for their head-spinning score and worked with David Byrne, André Benjamin, and Mitski. An erudite pianist championed early in his career by Wynton Marsalis, Pattishall has long held a fascination with production and sound design, dating back to over twenty years ago when he and Bhatia first started hanging out and listening to Madvillainy together. More recently Pattishall has quietly developed his own electroacoustic approach, culminating 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.
“Working together on this project felt seamless: we each brought elements and initial sketches and built the pieces collaboratively,” Pattishall explained. “The pieces weren’t constructed with traditional conventions. As we’ve both spent time investigating electronic music and the physics of sound as well as various strains of improvised music, we were able to communicate in a shared language.”
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.
“From the first time we tried this together, in a live set at Lincoln Center, I could hear the manipulated sonic tapestries I was constructing refracted back at me through Chris' piano playing—he was finding ways to respond in waves and gestures that felt totally at home with what I was doing, playing an acoustic instrument in a way that recalls the shapes of more electronic music he's been listening to all along,” Bhatia said of playing with his longtime friend. “The music came together quite quickly once we decided it needed to exist ... Everything was tracked in an afternoon; most of it was the first or second take, and despite its very meticulously layered feeling, it's all just two people creating together in real time.”