It must be Terry Riley week. How else to explain the sudden emergence of this pristine footage, which I’m sure some smarty-pants will shortly point out to me is actually from some DVD or such, this week along with revelations about the fine composer’s questionable eating habits. Terry Riley’s all night organ and tape loops concerts are the stuff of legend and it’s pretty marvelous to finally have a bit of filmed evidence to gawk at.
 

 
Even more interesting is this sadly brief little clip of the quartet of Riley, La Monte Young, Pandit Pran Nath and Marian Zazeela playing live in Rome. Riley doing a respectable job on the tablas:

 
And just for good measure and because it sounds great to me at the moment, here is a portion of La Monte Young’s The Second Dream of the HighTension Line Stepdown Transformer for your listening pleasure:

 
With thanks to Lance Grabmiller

 
I’d truly like to hear a collaboration by these two. Why not ?
 
Previously on DM : Metzger on Terry Riley
 
Thanks Ned Raggett via Brassica

 
The music of minimalist composer Terry Riley has always had a special place on my turntable and in my CD player. His 1967 album, A Rainbow in Curved Air is the perfect thing to put on when guests are over—it creates a great mood but never overpowers conversation—and you can bliss out on it like a meditation mantra (the composer’s intent, obviously). You can hear parts of it behind the narration of the original BBC radio broadcast of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe and it’s on the radio station in Grand Theft Auto IV. Chances are that even if you don’t know it by name, you’ve heard it many times.
 

 
In the 1960s Riley used to play all night concerts, with audience members showing up with sleeping bags. He’d use tape loops to accompany himself, letting them run by themselves when he had to take bathroom breaks. His 1964 piece “In C,” where the same series of notes are played over and over and over again by (at least) 35 musicians, with a single anchor melody of a “C” note played at octaves as eighth notes (serving as the metronome or “pulse” and played preferably by “a beautiful girl,” as the music’s notation instructs) is considered the very first minimalist composition. At a recital of “In C” at the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, 124 musicians took part.
 

 
The repetitive synth section that leads off The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” was inspired by Riley’s signature sound and the title is a portmanteau of his name and that of Indian mystic Meher Baba. He also did a collaboration with John Cale—both of them heavily influenced by LaMonte Young—called Church of Anthrax, which is absolutely amazing and deserves a post of its own at a later date.