Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band - Yoko Ono (1970)

Happy Birthday, Yoko! (b. 2/18/1933)

Robert Ashley Mega Post

Moving Into Lent

the wind sweeps in from out
crow’s wing brushes whisper across the forehead
they’re falling now
                                    a couple more
            funneled into sluice gates and caught
            before a finality is realized –
every so often you feel the wing brushing close
like a scythe whistling through the air
you wonder what gets harvested
            what blackness
            or searing light
            who the dark becomes
            blinding whiteout   
            and why

is it time
and is all this collateral
or is this a target

a morning is cruel, or it is not
a night is harrowing, or it is not
the world is pain, or it is not
the is and is not of wildly intersecting planes
flashing crazed like the eye blinks

Spacecraft - M.E.V. (1967)

Oraison - Olivier Messiaen (1937)

From the liner notes to Ohm: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music 1948-1980: "Oraison was not the first all electric work for the concert stage. It did, however, represent the first time a composer of this stature had devoted the whole piece to electrically produced sounds." The ondes martenot, an early primitive synthesizer that was a cross between an organ and a theremin, is the instrument in use here . . . and while, as noted, Messiaen was not the first to feature it, he was probably the first to use it as a centerpiece instead of part of an ensemble, and he was certainly the highest profile composer to do so.

La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura - Luigi Nono (1988-1989)

String Quartet No.3 - George Rochberg (1972)

America's first high-profile serialist composer goes tonal to the consternation of the serious music establishment. Rochberg created some well respected serial work (most notably his second symphony from 1955-56), but abandoned it in the mid sixties because he thought serial music lacked the capacity to express emotion. Rochberg challenged the modernist concept of stylistic obsolescence & "requisite nowness", instead championing “all human gestures available to all human beings at any time” prefiguring an attitude which would later come to be called "Postmodern". This storm crested with the Mahleresque gestures of his String Quartet No. 3, though the modern ear from the twenty teens hears a foreshadowing of the sampler in the repeated pizzicato backgrounding that appears in the first and third parts.

When the "avant garde" is the establishment, what truly is avant garde?

Convincing People - Peaches (2018)

The Western Lands Mixtapes Interlude: min im al izm

I have a long and somewhat complicated relationship with minimalism. I remember running across Koyaanisqatsi in '84 or '85, through a room mate who worked with a guy who had worked on the film. I remember being okay with the film . . . but boy, did 24-year-old punk rock me fucking hate Philip Glass. That opinion didn't change much as I moved (roughly) through punk to noise to free jazz to experimental free improv to modern classical. By the time I started really getting into John Cage, I started to appreciate space and silence in music much more than I had previously; but still, John Cage is not a minimalist, and chance operation is not the same repetition and decay, nor is spaciousness in music the same as ambiance. Glass's chirpy repetition bugs me, as does (to a lesser degree) Terry Riley's.

There is, of course, a lot of cross breeding between Minimalist "serious" music and experimental rock music, from the Velvet Underground - Cale shows up here with his Theater of Eternal Music crew, and you can see/hear a direct link between this and a song like "Venus in Furs" from the first album - through Mark E. Smith's three R's ("repetition, repetition, repetition"), to the druggy drones of Spacemen 3's Dreamweapon (which is heavily influenced by La Monte Young and Angus MacLise, and would fit in perfectly with this collection), to the high volume doom drones of Earth and Sunn O))). For me, always the 15-year-old metal head at heart, the heavier the drone, the better . . . but probably what really got me back into minimalism, as far as my own music is concerned, is the Buddha Machine.

I actually had a sort of joke minimalist piece on side 2 of Pain Free Living, the first Black Kaspar tape, called "Bring Me the Head of Terry Riley". What happened was that I had about 45 minutes worth of material for the tape, so I just duped them myself onto Radio Shack 90s, and put everything on the first side. Rather than leaving side two blank, or repeating the same program on both sides, I took a three second sample of my guitar shorting out while I was recording a solo, and looped it for 53 minutes. This does not really function like classical minimalism, since the loop does not decay or, indeed, change in any way whatsoever over the course of the 45 minute tape side. I did the whole piece as a goof; but Dan Willems, after listening to it a couple times whilst doing the dishes, told me it had a sort of weird, hypnotic, almost hallucinogenic effect on him . . . so, I suppose at some level it was a successful composition. And hey, it beat the fuck out of Philip Glass.

I got a few of the Buddha Machines and used them frequently in the 2012-2013 time frame. The videos above are short, but only because of the limitations of recording on my phone and uploading long video to YouTube . . . I was interested in working longer, though not as long as the standard minimalist pieces tend to go, and certainly not hours or days, which is the preferred working time frame of La Monte Young. And even beyond using them in my music, I still occasionally set them up and just let them go for my own listening pleasure.

At the end of the day, however, I am not a committed minimalist. Though the machines often show up in the music from the time frame listed above, they are often mutated much more aggressively than a minimalist would tolerate:

So, I am not a minimalist, but the influence is there. 

*          *          *          *          *

I recently posted a killer Bo Diddley video on facebook, and in the comments, lamented the fact that my collection was woefully lean on Bo's recorded output. Old friend Dave Cruse offered to hook me up with some outside/rare Bo, and a week or so later two (killer!) 90 minute Maxells showed up in my mailbox. In return, he asked for some minimalism, so he's getting four tapes worth. Before I get into the notes, I should say that, per the sixties minimalism practices, these performances were meant to experience, not listen to on a recording, and it is not a genre that lends itself well to recordings, generally speaking. And, obviously, this is not a comprehensive study, since it leaves off two seminal figures (Glass and Steve Reich), more traditional minimalists like Arvo Pärt and John Adams, precursors and fellow travelers like Moondog, John Cage and Morton Feldman, rock/pop crossovers like Arthur Russell, Faust, and Spacemen 3, and whole genres of dance music (including EDM) which should be included in minimalism.

Tape One starts with Terry Riley, and I've already slandered him a couple times, so I will stop. In C gets performed in Louisville at least once a year.

Ryhs Chatham is a favorite of mine, and not just because he assembles huge guitar orchestras. He has an almost Romantic approach to music (I am a sucker for Romantic composers and romanticism, generally speaking). The undulating swell of the first movement of The Crimson Grail faintly echoes various Wagner overtures, to my somewhat warped ear. Chatham also has a phenomenal recording called Two Gongs, which is . . . you guessed it! . . . two gongs getting bashed for over an hour, which is much more aesthetically in line with classical minimalism.

La Monte Young, with his connection to the Velvet Underground and the New York sixties scene in general, is probably the most high profile minimalist to the average rock fan. Young is also well known for his dedication to making performances of his music into happenings. The Well Tuned Piano is a piece that runs roughly five hours.

If I can be said to have a favorite artist who falls roughly into the minimalist category, it would probably be Henry Flynt. Flynt is an extraordinarily interesting person in a general sense, and You Are My Everlovin' is unique in the way it sucks in so much of the cultural scrapheap of America and puts it back out in a way so raw and honest that it virtually erases artifice altogether. Even Flynt's musical failures (and he has a few) are fascinating.

More from the New York scene as the Theater of Eternal Music crew comes across with an excerpt. As mentioned above, you could draw a direct line between this and "Venus in Furs".

I wish I could speak intelligently about Pauline Oliveros. Her work is fascinating, but I frankly have yet to really wrap my head around it. Here her concept of "deep listening" is on display: a group improv, but rather than the lightning quick chatter of the jazz improviser, this is slow, graceful, and seamless.

We mentioned the Young-VU connection between minimalism and rock, but David Bowie (along with Brian Eno) is the one who brought it to pop with his Berlin trilogy, most notably Low. It should be mentioned that the Krautrock scene was also heavily influenced by minimalism.

Phill Niblock, who is still very active, is one of the later New York minimalists. His hurdy gurdy pieces are fabulous in the way they reference the ground zero of minimalism, the primal source of the drone - the Southern or Central Asian tambura, the Indian tanpura or sitar - and do it with a European instrument, albeit one that has origins in the Middle East. Oh, and he's from my hometown, so shout out to Anderson Indiana!

Tony Conrad, another key figure of the notorious New York scene and member of The Primitives with Lou Reed and John Cale, is largely responsible for making the minimalist/Krautrock connection by collaborating with Faust in 1973. This particular cut comes from a 1995 album recorded by Steve Albini and featuring post-rockers David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke. Conrad was also quite the raconteur; the movie about him is a must-see.

The four volumes of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops are legendary: consisting of tape loop experiments he had done over the years, the Disintegration Loops were the result of the disintegration of the tapes as he tried to transfer them over to hard drives after years in storage. The loops famously were finished on September 11th, 2001, and served as soundtrack to videos that Basinski shot that day from his Brooklyn loft. 

CC Hennix is yet another of the New Yorkers, though she was born in Sweden. Like Conrad (and others), she is a mathematician.

Charlemagne Palestine is, you guessed it, another New Yorker, but more toward the gentle hippy side of things than provocateurs like Flynt and Conrad. This long piano piece is not unlike Young's Well Tuned Piano, but Palestine is actually playing a standard piano.

No Spotify playlist on this one. Most of these pieces are up on YouTube. Tapes are on the way, Dave. Enjoy!

Tape One
Side One
Terry Riley - In C
Rhys Chatham - The Crimson Grail (for 400 Guitars): Part One

Side Two
La Monte Young - The Well-Tuned Piano (excerpt)

Tape Two
Side One
Henry Flynt - You Are My Everlovin'

Side Two
Henry Flynt - Celestial Power

Tape Three
Side One
Theater of Eternal Music (John Cale, Tony Conrad, Angus MacLise, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela) - Inside the Dream Syndicate Volume I: Day of Niagara
Pauline Oliveros - "Suiren" from Deep Listening
David Bowie - "Wailing Wall" from Low

Side Two
Phill Niblock - Four Arthurs Superimposed with Two Octaves and a Fifth
Tony Conrad - "The Heterophony Of The Avenging Democrats, Outside, Cheers The Incineration Of The Pythagorean Elite, Whose Shrill Harmonic Agonies Merge And Shimmer Inside Their Torched Meeting House" from Slapping Pythagoras 

Tape Four
Side One
William Basinski - "dlp 1.02" from Disintegration Loops IV
Catherine Christer Hennix - The Electric Harpsichord

Side Two
Charlemagne Palestine - Strumming Music (excerpt)