With 1977’s seminal “Guitar Trio,” legendary No Wave composer Rhys Chatham tapped the radical simplicity of punk to further explore the overtone-saturated drones of his minimalist mentors Tony Conrad and LaMonte Young. The piece, as well as the multi-guitar symphonies that followed (involving as many as 400 players in a recent Paris performance), set the blueprint for guitar-based art rock as interpreted by everybody from Sonic Youth to Godspeed! You Black Emperor. At Soundlab tonight (Feb. 2), Chatham revisits “Guitar Trio,” re-conceiving it as a 40-minute piece in two parts for six guitarists, drums and bass. In addition to Chatham and touring partner David Daniell on guitars, the ensemble includes all-stars from the Buffalo experimental scene, including members of Bare Flames, Novelist, Post and Redman/Whitman/Sack. An added bonus is the original accompanying projections created for the piece by visual artist (and former Buffalonian) Robert Longo. Opening is drone rock experimentalists Novelist. This is a free show.

The increasingly omnipotent role of the market in the modern world is the subject of two worthy documentaries screening in Buffalo this weekend. The extensive use of private military companies (PMCs) in the Iraq War is the subject of Shadow Company, a documentary that has been praised for providing an objective look at a polarizing subject. Filmmakers Nick Bicanic and Jason Bourque contrast the pop culture image of mercenaries with the reality of men who work—and sometimes die—in an industry that has more than $100 billion in annual revenues and 70,000 employees in Iraq alone. It shows at Squeaky Wheel on Friday. The next night, Hallwalls presents China Blue, winner of Amnesty International’s Human Rights Award at the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam. Working clandestinely, filmmaker Micha Peled presents the working conditions at a Chinese factory that defies international labor laws, using teenagers around the clock to manufacture inexpensive blue jeans for clients in countries including the United States.

The Separation, sayeth the press material, is the following: “a dark parable about the death of the individual”; “a heavy metal requiem”; “an essay on the short life of a lonely sheep.” The nine-movement choral piece is also the brainchild of drummer/composer Bobby Previte and playwright/director Andrea Kleine—a rethinking of Guilliaume Dufay’s 15th-century choral epic, Missa Sancti Jacobi, and Olivier Messiaen’s organ masterwork, La Nativitié du Seigneur. The piece, co-commissioned by Hallwalls and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, hurls the electro-metallic work of Previte’s Coalition of the Willing (Previte on drums, Marco Benevento on organ, Reed Mathis on guitar) against the voices and instrumentation of Jordon Sramek’s Rose Ensemble, whose reconfigurations of renaissance, baroque and medieval music have won international acclaim. Against and throughout, Kleine’s story unfolds, carried forth by shadow puppet films. Previte, a native of Niagara Falls and a UB graduate who studied with John Cage, Morton Feldman and Jan Williams, performs the piece twice in Asbury Hall at the Church this week—a terrific venue for this rare fusion of art, theater and music.

Legendary poet Saul Williams is a powerful voice—a poet, preacher, actor, rapper, singer and musician. His groundbreaking work as a writer and actor have placed him on the front lines of the spoken word/slam poetry movement across the country; he’s perhaps most widely known for his leading role in the 1998 film Slam, which won the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize and the Cannes Camera D’Or. Williams has performed with the Fugees, Blackalicious, Erykah Badu, KRS-One, De La Soul and DJ Krust, as well as with poets Allen Ginsberg and Sonia Sanchez. He’s been published in the New York Times, Esquire, Bomb Magazine and African Voices, and has released four collections of poetry. Born in 1972 after his mother was rushed to the hospital from a James Brown concert, Williams believes the Godfather’s spirit runs through his veins: “At that concert, he sang, ‘Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,’ and that shit came out in my bloodstream. I was born with that in me.” Williams appears as part of Niagara County Community College’s observance of Black History Month.