MUSIC Christopher Riggs finds an uncommon resonance with their students

An experimental guitarist and autistic person, Riggs teaches their classes at Doolittle

Elementary about the creative power of ignoring convention.

By AUSTIN WOODS

Christopher Riggs doesn’t just play the electric guitar. They deconstruct it. They strip it down to its most fundamental elements. Forget scales, arpeggios, and even standard tunings—keys and harmonies are myths, anyway. Riggs eschews these things entirely, instead dragging their guitar to the brink and inviting us to hear the results.

That’s not to suggest that Riggs—who’s also a music teacher for Chicago Public Schools—is incapable of making conventionally attractive sounds in conventional ways. They would just prefer not to. They’re much more interested in laying the guitar flat and working it over like a patient on an operating table. They usually “prepare” it by wedging an array of magnets, springs, and other metal objects either be- tween its strings or under them, contacting the pickups. They like to scrape at it with a violin bow, like a saw against bone, and sometimes they extract the pickups from the guitar entirely to manipulate them. The resulting textures sound more like a pneumatic drill than a guitar: brutalist, abstract, cold.

But Riggs the person is the opposite. They’re a able, warm, and always willing to poke fun at their craft. You might wonder how they ended up devoted to grinding, entropic noise, but the answer is pretty mundane—they make this racket because they like it. Cacophony sounds good to them.

In fact, it’s a bit misleading to carry on about how “ugly” Riggs’s music is, because it’s not meant to evoke ugliness. Riggs says it’s not really meant to evoke anything. It’s just the sound of someone exploring the limits of their instrument and having a blast doing it. Riggs is an autistic person, and they link this to their musical practice (or “musicking,” as they call it). They view their guitar playing as a form of stimming—short for self-stimulating behavior. Some autistic people engage in stimming to control stress or anxiety, to help with sensory regulation or reinforcement, or simply to relax or enjoy themselves.

“It’s a very satisfactory feedback loop,” Riggs says. “To me, that seems to fit in the framework of stimming . . . like, ‘This sound needs to be very specific, and I just want to keep doing it.’”

It goes without saying Riggs is not your