Artist.......: Tony Conrad With Faust
Album........: Outside The Dream Syndicate 30th Anniversary EditionLabel........: Table of the Elements
Genre........: Avantgarde
Catnr........: SWC-CD 302
source.......: CDDA
rip.date.....: Apr-25-2006
str.date.....: Apr-06-2004
quality......: VBR/44,1Hz/Joint-Stereo
Url..........: n/a
track title time
CD1
01. From the Side of Man and Womankind 27:17
02. From the Side of the Machine 26:20
CD2
01. Pyre of Angus Was in Kathmandu 03:39
02. Death of the Composer Was in 1962 03:16
03. From the Side of Woman and Mankind 31:10
(Complete Version)
Runtime 91:42 min
Size 138,8 MB
Release Notes:
Biography by Jason Ankeny
A pioneering force behind the evolution of
minimalism, violinist and composer Tony Conrad
introduced the idea of "Eternal Music," a droning,
mesmerizing performance idiom which employed long
durations, amplification and precise pitch to
explore new worlds of sound; through both his solo
work and through collaborations with artists
including LaMonte Young, John Cale and Faust, he
forged new creative directions which proved
enormously influential on successive generations of
artists ranging in background from pop to the
avant-garde. Born in Baltimore in 1940, Conrad
studied music at Harvard, where he was first
exposed to the work of John Cage and David Tudor;
among his fellow students were David Behrman,
Christian Wolff and Frederic Rzewski, all of whom
later pursued careers in experimental music as
well.
After graduating in 1962, Conrad relocated to New
York, where he became immersed in the city's
burgeoning underground music scene; there he first
joined forces with composer and saxophonist LaMonte
Young, who at the time was leading an
improvisational group including his wife Marian
Zazeela on voice-drone, Billy Name (later a staple
of Andy Warhol's Factory scene) on guitar, and
Angus MacLise on percussion. Conrad approached
Young about performing with the group, and by 1963
a new line-up also consisting of Zazeela and the
young Welsh musician John Cale began playing about
town in an ensemble variously dubbed the Dream
Syndicate and the Theater of Eternal Music.
Sustaining notes for hours at a time, their
improvised dissections of specific harmonic
intervals rejected the compositional process,
instead elaborating shared performance concepts.
The Dream Syndicate disbanded in 1965, with Conrad,
Young and Cale all later staking claim to authoring
of the "Eternal Music" aesthetic; Young also held
on to the group's live tapes. Still, Conrad and
Cale continued collaborating, joining young
Pickwick company songwriter Lou Reed and sculptor
Walter de Maria in a rock band called the
Primitives, on tour in support of their lone
single, the Reed-penned "Do the Ostrich." (Conrad
also proved a key contributor to early Velvet
Underground lore by giving Reed the S&M book from
which the band derived its name.) By this time,
Conrad had also begun channeling his energies into
filmmaking, working as a sound engineer and
technical advisor on the experimental features of
camp icon Jack Smith, including his 1963
masterpiece Flaming Creatures.
In time, Conrad also began directing his own
features ù among them The Flicker, Coming
Attractions, The Eye of Count Flickenstein and Film
Feedback ù also composing their respective scores.
It was through a German filmmaker travelling in New
York City that Conrad first learned of the nascent
Kraut-rock scene of the early '70s, and he soon
began communicating with the members of Faust.
Eventually, he travelled to the group's farm in the
northern German community of Wuemme, where a
three-day session yielded the 1973 collaboration
Outside the Dream Syndicate, Conrad's first-ever
proper recording. Upon returning to the U.S.,
however, he largely abandoned performing to accept
a teaching position at the University at Buffalo's
Department of Media Study, a job he continued to
hold throughout the decades which followed; among
his students were the future members of the
noise-pop outfit Mercury Rev.
Only in 1993, when Jeff Hunt's Table of the
Elements label reissued Outside the Dream
Syndicate, did Conrad begin considering an active
return to performing; he and Faust both soon
appeared live at Hunt's first Manganese music
festival in Atlanta, and in 1995 Conrad recorded
the album Slapping Pythagoras, his first new work
in over two decades. Next was the single "The
Japanese Room at La Pagode," a collaboration with
Gastr del Sol, and in 1996 he issued Four Violins,
a piece dating back to 1964. A year later, Conrad
released Early Minimalism, a four-disc collection
including not only the aforementioned Four Violins
but also newly-recorded recreations of vintage
Dream Syndicate performances. Collaborations with
Jim O'Rourke, the Dead C and Pulp guitarist Mark
Webber were all scheduled to follow.