It was a loud rock-out event.

Rock-out — because of guitarist Rhys Chatham plus eight electric guitarists relentlessly strumming a rhythmic four bar beat.

Rock-out — because of these now pulsating guitar and string drones that surely sent the players and most of the audience into the zone.

Technically, there's of course a lot of knowledge and tradition and strong concept behind what initially looks and sounds like a simplistic guitar-led group vamp.

Rhys Chatham has studied LaMonte Young's music, played the trumpet in the 1990's, and then returned to playing the guitar. In the 1970's, he had begun programming music shows at the Knitting Factory in New York. His artistic associates include people like visual artist Robert Longo, Brian Eno, Robert Fripp and Fred Frith, and composers Morton Feldman and Morton Subotnick. While his music is often described as Minimalist, you can hear that Rhys has also absorbed, to good effect, the expressions of groups like the Ramones.

This evening was an unpretentious example of the integration of rock into art music, and it began appropriately with two visual/sound projections on a white screen, courtesy of Toronto musician/artist Eugene Martynec.

In Martynec's first projection, a static camera has recorded people, cycles, and cars in China (Beijing, perhaps?) as they pass by a stone gateway. A recorded piano cascades and moves stepwise in chords. Arranged in a grid (checkerboard fashion) — and propelled by a voiceover male voice speaking Chinese — one street picture soon grows into forty; or finally ends up as one small image suspended in a white Minimalist space. Individualism is possible, even in a populous, multi-gridded changing society, the projection seemed to say and show.

Trance, and out.