“You hear one second of Tony’s music and you know it’s him,” Jim O’Rourke says in a new documentary about Tony Conrad, the experimental composer, multi-media pioneer, and art-world gadfly, who died last April. It is ironic, then, that his bowed drones only exert their full power across long stretches of time. It is a music of extreme duration—an endurance test, even, but one whose payoff is a kind of nirvana.
It is partly thanks to O’Rourke that I know this at all. In the mid 1990s, when Conrad remained an obscure figure even to many experimental music fans, O’Rourke and David Grubbs, then playing as Gastr del Sol, went out on tour with the minimalist pioneer several decades their senior. I was in the crowd when they played at the Met Café in Providence, Rhode Island, and I am not embarrassed to admit that for a good stretch of Conrad’s performance, I did not get it at all.
Standing behind a semi-transparent scrim, silhouetted by a floor-level light behind him, he shouldered his violin and began bowing a sustained tone, accompanied by a cellist seated in the background. The notes went neither up nor down. Just: eeeeeeeeeeeee. It was as though something had gotten stuck, like a glitch in the matrix had left us beached on this long, narrow sliver of time. I was in my mid 20s; I hadn’t been exposed to much experimental music. It seemed nonsensical; it seemed excessive.
Standing there in that half-empty rock club, listening to a single note drawn out to a horizon I couldn’t perceive, I got to thinking: Surely there must be a reason he’s doing this. He could have stopped whenever he wanted, and didn't—that had to mean something. I found myself relaxing into the monotony, basking in the spray of harmonics that three or four held strings could throw off. I didn’t know it at the time, but Conrad had just introduced me to one of John Cage’s maxims: “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”
Conrad helped introduce the idea of extreme duration to experimental music, and indirectly to rock‘n’roll. In the 1960s, he played alongside La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, John Cale, and others in the Theatre of Eternal Music, a ragged outfit that used minimalist psychedelia as a kind of crowbar to crack open the window to a higher plane of consciousness. He also played with Cale and Lou Reed in a short-lived group called the Primitives, and it's even said that Reed and Cale borrowed their Velvet Underground moniker from the title of a book they found in Conrad’s apartment. “You don’t know who I am, but somehow, indirectly, you’ve been affected by things I did,” Conrad told The Guardian last year, discussing his role as an unlikely linchpin of the past five decades of alternative music. “I don’t mind being anonymous, though. I hate celebrity. When you walk down the street and people want to know this and that, it’s horrible.”
Lately, Conrad is being recognized, and rediscovered, for his work beyond the drone. A spate of projects is helping introduce new generations of listeners to his mind-opening art and playful persona. Below, we run down the new documentary on him, a recent online archive of 200 hours’ worth of his piano improvisations, and select classics from his catalog that make for apt starting places.
Photo by Lex van Rossen/MAI/Redferns
Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present
Director Tyler Hubby spent more than 20 years filming Conrad, which gives Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present a long-view scope that seems particularly fitting of its subject. Conrad died shortly before Hubby finished the documentary, but instead of a eulogy, it comes across as a tribute to his boundless life force. It's loosely structured around key facets of Conrad’s work: his time in the Theatre of Eternal Music; his groundbreaking structuralist cinema; and his professorship at SUNY Buffalo, including his cable-access call-in TV show designed to help students with their homework.
If there's a running theme, it is Conrad’s decades-long struggle with La Monte Young over the Theatre of Eternal Music’s tape archives. Young keeps the tapes under lock and key, adamant that they are his own copyright compositions, but Conrad considers them expressions of spontaneous, collective creation. That conflict goes to the heart of Hubby's portrait of Conrad as an idealist and radical thinker years beyond our own narcissistic times.
Various friends and collaborators offer insight and biographical color, including Jim O’Rourke, David Grubbs, fellow drone musician Charlemagne Palestine, and, particularly, Jeff Hunt, whose Table of the Elements label was instrumental in reintroducing Conrad’s music to a new generation of listeners in the ‘90s. But the real pleasure is to be had in Conrad’s own company. He's a wonderful character—funny, self-deprecating, generous, cheerfully acerbic, and clearly the smartest guy in any room. As the film ends, we watch him standing in the middle of a busy Manhattan street, “conducting” traffic and capturing the sounds on tape. Conrad may have dreamed of abolishing the composer, but Completely in the Present suggests that we would inhabit a much quieter, less joyful world were it not for his example.
Until May 8, viewers in the U.S. and the UK can screen the documentary for free on MUBI; registration with credit card or PayPal required.
Music and the Mind of the World
An extreme example of Conrad's obsession with duration, Music and the Mind of the World is a staggering work of long-form vision, with 200-odd hours of piano improvisations intended to be regarded as a single composition. Recorded onto more than 200 cassette tapes between 1976 and 1982, the collection has been digitized and archived online by the artist Cory Arcangel and his team at Arcangel Surfware, who collaborated with Conrad on the project before his death.
Conrad didn’t teach himself to play the piano until adulthood, and he approached the instrument in typically idiosyncratic fashion: as a bridge between Western tradition and philosophical investigation. Operating under the influence of John Cage, he learned to find pleasure in randomness, difficulty, and sounds that he actively disliked—such as the pop songs and dance rhythms favored by his friend Jack Smith, the experimental filmmaker, whose preferences Conrad found “distastefully common.” Conrad's improvisations functioned as an unlikely way to shoehorn conventional melodicism into difficult shapes, and vice versa. As Conrad explains in an introduction to the project, “There are lengthy moments among these recordings that for me are a simple joy to hear. These keep me tethered close to the piece, but the more awkward and unlistenable segments are by far the most interesting.”
The method behind Music and the Sound of the World is fairly straightforward: For six years, every time he touched a piano, Conrad recorded it. What emerges are ruminative tone poems, halting chromatic explorations, tumbledown blues, and moments of profound cacophony resembling a moth-eaten player piano roll—all veiled in the hiss and buzz of disintegrating tapes. Listening to the recordings can be as messy as eavesdropping on someone’s thoughts—and as revealing, too. The first selection is among the most conventionally beautiful of the whole series: Conrad lets his right hand wander dreamily in slow, meandering circles, but his left remains reassuringly anchored on the root note; there are no real moments of discord. It is essentially a rising and falling musical reverie—a low-key fantasia that floats a few feet in the air, bumping lightly against the ground like a slowly deflating balloon.
Reading Conrad’s text, however, we learn that he recorded this piece on the same afternoon that his mother died (Christmas Day, 1976). What we hear, then, is not only the theoretician working out a complex thought process about the Western tradition and Fluxus-inspired art practice. It is a remarkable snapshot of emotion—grief, love, and more nameless sentiments—recorded in real time.
Tony Conrad with Faust — Outside the Dream Syndicate (1973/1993)
Recorded in 1973 and largely forgotten in its day, Outside the Dream Syndicate finds Conrad hooking up with Hamburg’s legendarily incendiary experimental rockers for a set of meditative studies in pulse and drone. Faust kick off “The Side of Man and Womankind” with a dirge-like bass-and-drums stomp, but it quickly becomes clear that it’s their American colleague who is in charge. Conrad’s see-sawing frequencies quickly swell to fill the frame, his microtonal harmonies throwing off sparks that settle into a steady glow. “The Side of the Machine” picks up the pace and ratchets up the feedback several notches. Both tracks sound like unforgiving takes on the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs”—tastes of the whip so severe, they leaves welts on the tongue. Re-released on Table of the Elements in 1993, this is the record that introduced a new generation to Conrad, setting in motion a broad rethinking of the minimalist canon. A bonus track, released on the 30th anniversary edition in 2002, is appropriately titled, “The Death of the Composer Was in 1962.”
Tony Conrad — Slapping Pythagoras (1995)
Tony Conrad brushed up against the popular music industry while playing for screaming teenagers in Lou Reed's band the Primitives, and he did so once again, even more glancingly, with his 1995 album Slapping Pythagoras. The album featured none other than Steve Albini in the engineer’s chair, but Slapping Pythagoras was no Nevermind. With abstruse liner notes savaging the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras for his invention of Western tuning systems, the album gave itself euphorically over to Conrad’s preferred microtonal riot. The lineup is a who’s-who of the Chicago experimental scene, with Thymme Jones, Kevin Drumm, David Grubbs, and Jim O’Rourke—the latter on guitar, accordion, and weed trimmer—all in attendance. It is a bowing, scraping din of formidable intensity.
Tony Conrad – Four Violins (1964) (1996)
Wanting to share his collective's music with his girlfriend but unable to wrest the tapes from La Monte Young's hands, Conrad did the next best thing: He overdubbed four solo violin parts to cassette. The tape would languish in obscurity until the mid ’90s, when it turned up unannounced, in a bubble-wrap envelope, in Jeff Hunt’s mailbox in Atlanta. In 1996, Hunt released the piece—as monumental as it is mind-bogglingly simple—on his Table of the Elements label. Shorn of the rhythmic underpinnings of Conrad's Faust collaboration, it is a breathtaking example of pure drone music, and it sounds by turns like a sleeping dragon and a power saw.
“The history of American minimalism had been written, and it contained Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley and La Monte Young,” Hunt says in Completely in the Present, recalling his first encounter with the "Four Violins" recording. “This one shabby little cassette tape was exhibit A, it was the smoking gun: The entire history of American minimalism was wrong. It was inaccurate. Tony Conrad had been written out of it.”