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TONY CONRAD
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"TONY CONRAD IS A PIONEER, AS SEMINAL IN HIS WAY TO AMERICAN MUSIC AS JOHNNY CASH OR CAPTAIN BEEFHEART OR ORNETTE COLEMAN, ONE OF THOSE REALLY SAVVY OLD GUYS WHOM ALL THE KIDS WANT TO EMULATE BECAUSE THEIR IDEAS, THEIR STYLE ARE ELECTRIC AND NEW AND SOMEHOW INDIVISIBLE." --The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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on TONY CONRAD Four Violins (1964):
"The most striking quality of Four Violins is its instant familiarity: the grating sound of the violin parts imparts a vision of a uniquely American distance, the feel of a continent. It's a quality also present in the spaces surrounding John Fahey's or Loren Mazzacane's rattled notes, the early Sun recordings, the compositions of Charles Ives, the righteous soul-breath of Albert Ayler. With Four Violins Conrad moves closer to sound-essence, to ringing out the notes which have always existed in the skies of America. The joy comes from connecting with Conrad's language, from following its own logic -- like railroads roaring out into the Midwest. It's a landmark recording in every sense, and the fact that this is only the first of many forthcoming Conrad installments from Table of the Elements makes me feel like howling with joy." --David Keenan, The Wire
(Table of the Elements, 1997)
on TONY CONRAD WITH FAUST Outside the Dream Syndicate (1972): The silence ended here. Made over three days on a remote farm in northern Germany, Outside the Dream Syndicate Tony Conrads historic 1972 meeting with rock visionaries Faust was the composer and violinists debut album and a revelatory document of his central role in the birth of minimalism. Issued only in Europe, it was the first officially available record of Conrads microtonal explorations, initiated in the Dream Syndicate in the early 1960s. This 30th anniversary reissue features a second disk of originally unreleased music from the sessions and restores Outside the Dream Syndicate to its rightful place in history: as the vital link between early minimalism and the rock avant-garde and a gripping testament to the power and beauty of the Drone. "Out-machines Metal Machine Music." -- Creem
"Behold the glacier with an amplified pulse!" -- Tower Pulse
"Conrad invents a new musical language . . . unbearably intense and gloriously ecstatic." -- The Wire
"In the very early '60s, The Dream Syndicate played epic unchanging chamber dirges with intellectual perfection combined with lots of pre-Hippy Fuckoff! . . . Outside the Dream Syndicate was a heavenly marriage. This long unchanging mantra was epic, dignified and strung out. Like the huge grey and white photo of him on the LP jacket, Tony Conrad was a ghost upon his own record. His violin hung like a spectre over the whole album, but never did it even dip or sway. Much more minimal even than John Cale, here was a musician with a quest from the beyond." -- Julian Cope, in Krautrocksampler
(Table of the Elements, 1993; 30th Anniversary Deluxe Reissue, 2002)
on TONY CONRAD Slapping Pythagoras (1995):
Tony Conrad is one of the most compelling figures in 20th century music, but it was not until the release of Slapping Pythagoras in 1995 that his work and storied history became widely known and recognized. With this lavish 2002 reissue (one in a series of Conrad reissues), Table of the Elements presents the record that established Conrad's relevance and influence for a new generation of listeners.
Conrad's past is well documented: In 1962 he co-founded the groundbreaking minimalist ensemble now known as the Dream Syndicate. Wielding a drone both aggressively confrontational and subtly mesmerizing, he and his collaborators, including John Cale and Angus MacLise, created some of the most revolutionary music of that -- or any -- decade.
Following the dissolution of the group in 1966, Conrad played a pivotal role in the formation of the Velvet Underground, then refocused his efforts on experimental film and video, resurfacing briefly to jam with German group Faust on the 1972 LP Outside the Dream Syndicate (also scheduled for reissue as a double-CD on Table of the Elements).
In 1995 Conrad returned to the studio to direct his own ensemble, which included Kevin Drumm, David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke (of Gastr del Sol). The result, Slapping Pythagoras , is as thrilling, vigorous and downright antisocial as any great rock album (which it is); it reconfigures the lost dream music, addresses nearly thirty years of silence, and confirms Conrad as a giant in the soundscape of American music.
Recorded by Steve Albini (Bush, Nirvana, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page) and Jim O'Rourke (Stereolab, Sonic Youth, Wilco).
"In the beginning there was the Drone, the primordial, mind-splitting hum generated by the strings, keyboards and revolutionary lost-chord Zeitgeist of 60's group the Dream Syndicate . . . Slapping Pythagoras is the sound of stasis in excelsis , the fluid microtonal om of Conrad's violin resolving into deep pools of rich, alien harmony." -- Rolling Stone
"Tony Conrad is a pioneer, as seminal in his way to American music as Johnny Cash or Captain Beefheart or Ornette Coleman, one of those really savvy Old Guys whom all the kids want to emulate because their ideas, their style are electric and new and somehow indivisible." -- Atlanta Journal-Constitution
(Table of the Elements, 1995; Deluxe Reissue, 2002)
on TONY CONRAD Early Minimalism Volume I (1987-1996):
"HISTORY IS LIKE MUSIC -- COMPLETELY IN THE PRESENT."
4xCD BOX SET WITH 96-PAGE BOOK AND ENHANCED CD-ROM FEATURING INTERVIEWS, PERFORMANCE FOOTAGE AND VIDEO SCORES. INCLUDES FOUR VIOLINS (1964); EARLY MINIMALISM APRIL 1965, EARLY MINIMALISM: MAY 1965, EARLY MINIMALISM: JUNE 1965.
In 1962 Tony Conrad's amplified strings introduced the sustained drone of just-intonation into what came to be known as "minimal" music. Utilizing long durations and precise pitch, he and his collaborators forged an aggressively mesmerizing "Dream Music" -- denying the activity of composition, elaborating shared ideas of performance, and articulating the Big Bang of "minimalism." However, the many rehearsal and performance recordings from this period were repressed, inaccessibly buried.
In 1987 Tony Conrad set out on a ten-year return expedition to the site of these entombed fragments to unearth the losses; from them he reconstituted and regenerated the epic EARLY MINIMALISM. Reaching back through time, Tony Conrad weaves a mobile narrative over and under minimalism: making music out of history, and history out of music.
"Tony Conrad is a pioneer, as seminal in his way to American music as Johnny Cash or Captain Beefheart or Ornette Coleman, one of those really savvy Old Guys whom all the kids want to emulate because their ideas, their style are electric and new and somehow indivisible." --Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Conrad invents a new musical language . . . unbearably intense and gloriously ecstatic. A landmark recording in every sense." -- The Wire
"Totally uncompromising ... a marvel." -- Artforum
"The perfect sound." -- Chicago Reader
"Groundbreaking." -- Billboard
"Brilliant." -- New York Times
(Table of the Elements, 1997; Reissue, 2002)
JOHN CALE, TONY CONRAD, ANGUS MACLISE, LA MONTE YOUNG, MARIAN ZAZEELA Day of Niagara: Inside the Dream Syndicate Vol. I (1965)
"In the beginning there was the Drone, the primordial, mind-splitting Om generated by the strings and revolutionary lost-chord Zeitgeist of 1960's group the Dream Syndicate." -- Rolling Stone
From 1962 through 1965 John Cale, Tony Conrad, Angus MacLise, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela participated in a collaborative ensemble that articulated the Big Bang of "minimalism." Utilizing long duration and precise pitch, they forged an aggressively mesmerizing "Dream Music"--denying the activity of composition and elaborating shared ideas of performance and improvisation. However, the many rehearsal and performance recordings from this period were repressed, and remained inaccessibly buried until this moment. Now, with the recent discovery of an additional cache of tapes, digitally restored and remastered, the world can step inside the Dream Syndicate for the very first time.
"These recordings are (part of) a library of effort that represented, for Tony and I at least, a labour of love. The power and majesty that was in that music is still on these tapes." --John Cale
"What I had learned first about John Cale was that he had written a piece which pushed a piano down a mine shaft. We hungered for music almost seething beyond control--or even something just beyond music, a violent feeling of soaring unstoppably, powered by immense angular machinery across abrupt and torrential seas of pounding blood." --Tony Conrad
"A bracing and powerful document of a hugely influential ensemble that changed the sound of modern music." -- Chicago Tribune
"Mindbending." -- Spin
"Intellectual perfection combined with lots of pre-Hippy Fuckoff!" --Julian Cope
"The skyscraping wall of amplified string drone that is erected here towers over almost everything. Coupled with Cale's hypnotic, deafening, avant-rock viola is Conrad's equally impressive double-stop violin playing. Together they produce the sound illusion of some huge electrical generator, a grinding musical turbine that is forever shooting sparks to ignite the imagination.
Day of Niagara is an incredible piece of music. That it exists and is, at last, available to anyone who wants to hear it is nothing short of a miracle. Rejoice!" -- The Wire
(Table of the Elements, 2000)
on JOHN CALE Sun Blindness Music (1965-1968)
Dream Interpretation: Inside the Dream Syndicate Vol. II (1964-1969) Stainless Gamelan: Inside the Dream Syndicate Vol. III (1965-1968):
(featuring TONY CONRAD, STERLING MORRISON and ANGUS MACLISE, recorded and produced by TONY CONRAD)
John Cale's great credit, both inside and outside the Velvet Underground, was to have found the inoculation dosage that would addict the music industry to SOUND without alienating one world from the other. But outside the "official" VU there was also an uncut version of the virus, incubated behind the slum walls of the 1960s Lower East Side, and maintained live in the liquid nitrogen of these insolently recorded reel-to-reel audiotapes, recorded and produced by Tony Conrad and now available in the Table of the Elements CD series, "New York in the 1960s."
"The recordings in this three-disc series come from another underground, a deep vein of labor and experimentation that parallels Cale's time with the Velvets. It is jubilantly private music, made alone and with like-minded spirits -- Tony Conrad, Sterling Morrison, original Velvets percussionist Angus MacLise -- far from the hot light of the Velvets' public notoriety and the rough politics of Cale's relationship with Reed. And it is important music, an illuminating, heretofore unknown chapter in Cale's creative advance.
What is truly extraordinary about the sixteen performances spread across these three volumes -- Sun Blindness Music, Dream Interpretation and Stainless Gamelan -- is their explosive foresight. The florid distortion of Cale's guitar pieces and the tandem bull-elephant hum of his viola and Conrad's violin prefigure the aggressive majesty and expressive dissonance of punk rock, No Wave and the Transfigured Guitar movement led by Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham and Sonic Youth. In his pulsing keyboard essays, Cale marries the grace and science of minimalism to the mainstream throb of rock &roll, a full decade ahead of Brian Eno and the Berlin-era David Bowie. When Cale tests the barriers of possibility in his tools - the guts of an abandoned piano, the jammed keys on an organ, the pause control of a Wollensak tape recorder - he generates a synthetic music that connects Edgard Varése, Henry Cowell and Karlheinz Stockhausen with contemporary electronica and turntablism.
These recordings have been virtually unheard since they were made more than three decades ago. But their prescience is undeniable. So is their power and purity. Working in the shadows of both pop and art, building on discoveries and inventions from his life before and with the Velvets, Cale committed to tape a highly personal and exhilarating vision of the future of music. It now sounds like fact." --David Fricke, from the liner notes
"John Cale is rock's international traveler. His work is a trans-continental drift of moons and maps, seas and seachange, envoys and ennui...his eye has spanned the globe and his mind ranged as far from rock's parochial trails as it's possible to get...his world is bounded only by the limits of his imagination." -- The Wire
"This music is the intimate expression of a committed seeker, a strange magic finally heard in its humble seductive essence." -- Rolling Stone
(Tony Conrad's Audio ArtKive/Table of the Elements, 2001)
on JACK SMITH Les Evening Gowns Damnees (1962-1964) Silent Shadows on Cinemaroc Island (1962-1964):
(featuring TONY CONRAD, JOHN CALE and ANGUS MACLISE, recorded and produced by TONY CONRAD)
Tony Conrad's Audio ArtKive presents a series of remarkable vintage recordings which feature the protean film-maker, photographer and performance artist Jack Smith (1932-1989). The material includes readings of short stories and other audio excursions (featuring musical accompaniment from the likes of Conrad, John Cale and Angus MacLise), as well as excerpts from Conrad's soundtrack to Smith's notorious and groundbreaking film Flaming Creatures (1962). Recorded in glistening monaural lo-fidelity at Conrad's 56 Ludlow Street studio between 1962 - 1964, these pieces reveal an important facet of Smith's artistic legacy, and offer a rare glimpse at one of that decade's most influential milieu.
"Brilliant is an overused word, but it is the only one that will do for Smith. He was a difficult man who made an art of radical absurdity, one that recasts notions of beauty and authenticity in a new language -- pansexual, by most lights grotesque -- without abandoning the core concepts themselves. . .And he lived more or less the life he preached -- a cross between agent provocateur and struggling student -- to the end of his days.
This isn't a model with much cachet at the moment. Maybe the streets have become too mean, or too soft to encourage it. Art schools turn out professionals; art itself often comes bite-size and neat as a pin. But Smith's work was the opposite of that. For him, one suspects, art wasn't bigger or smaller than life; it was life -- messy, silly, awful, grand and above all transformative." --Holland Cotter, The New York Times
"I genuflect before Jack Smith, the only true 'underground' film-maker." --John Waters
"He was uncompromising. He had everything." --Robert Wilson
Gadfly, trickster, visionary -- Jack Smith changed the art world. In what seems like tamer times, it's great to look back at a genuine and truly out-there revolutionary." --Laurie Anderson
(Tony Conrad's Audio ArtKive/Table of the Elements, 1997)
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Tony Conrad (b. 1940) teaches on the media study faculty of SUNY at Buffalo. Over the last twenty years he has been especially active in video. His work with music composition and performance started while he was a mathematics student, after which he was associated with the founding of "minimal" music and "underground" film. His movie The Flicker is one of the key early works of the "structural" film movement. His art videotapes are widely seen, and he has produced more than 250 programs for public access cable in Buffalo. Conrad performs his recent music regularly at festivals, clubs and new music venues in the US and Europe.
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for more information contact:
Table of the Elements P.O. Box 5524 Atlanta, Georgia 31107 USA
info@tableoftheelements.com www.tableoftheelements.com
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