Charlemagne Palestine

Like Tony Conrad, Rhys Chatham, and Phill Niblock, Charlemagne Palestine is one of the great under-sung heroes of American musical minimalism, a vibrant composer who made the concept wilder, weirder, and more wonderful. In fact, Palestine has long referred to himself as a maximalist, a tongue-in-cheek rebuttal that gets to his propensity for using minimalism’s restraints to create an enormous tide of sound. His 1974 album Strumming Music is a landmark and lodestar of that idea—using only two piano notes, Palestine created a sustained cloud of sound so radiant and enormous the effect became hallucinatory and heavenly, as if the listener had been carried away to some other dimension. That simple but stunning premise has defined so much of Palestine’s work, whether he was commanding an organ or the bells of a carillon.

Palestine remains overlooked, in part, due to his early and insistent recognition that the division between disciplines of art was artificial. “Because of the schizy nature of the Art vs. Music vs. Film vs. Performance scenes over the past 40-ish years,” he once wrote, “I’ve decided to integrate it all into a larger context that I call ‘Charleworld’!” In Charleworld, enormous menageries of colorful stuffed animals can crowd keyboards and line walls as Palestine hoots and hollers above the immersive roar of whatever instrument he has opted to play, like Keith Jarrett in absolute overdrive. Palestine remains a testament to having fun by breaking rules—and finding unexpected magic therein.