Theatre of Eternal Music

"I thought the hippie version of finding Jesus was finding Jesus."

---> It's true. But so is artsy fartsy dudes turning Hindu and chanting for days on end. So I guess it's just ONE of the hippie versions of finding Jesus.

"The problem with your theory is that Terry Riley is even more of a hippy dippy, eastward journeying, psychedelic guy and his music is way better as well."

---> It's true. Terry Riley totally wins. Although, he has put out some terrible shit, too. "Song for the Ten Voices of the Two Prophets" has no redeeming value. Yet at the same time, I hear he makes a wicked salsa. Fresh organic ingredients of course.

Emma Bunton:

http://www.leninimports.com/emma_bunton_gallery_10.jpg

And I appreciate the importance of La Monte Young. I just don't enjoy the Theatre of Eternal Music.

"Song for the Ten Voices of the Two Prophets" has no redeeming value.

I like it, the vocals threw me at first, but the textures are nice & the last track is a career highpoint

after years of no one even being able to hear this stuff, the internet flooded us with countless hours worth of various marathon jam sessions -- I can understand it not being everyone's thing, though I think the peak tapes are better than 99.9% of the music usually discussed around here and when it's played loud with bass it's pretty life changing, in fact you shouldn't write this music off before you've heard it extremely amplified

favorite three boots:
the 'Theatre of Eternal Music' 2 CD set transfer of a radio special (with german dj introducing each piece) -- my favorite
“Der Zweck Dieser Serie ist Nicht Unterhaltung! (1957-1973)” is a 4 CD set of German Boots -- this one has excerpts of just about every major piece, so it's comprehensive, even if I prefer some of the other performances
"WKCR tapes" - favorite versions of the scraping noise pieces & "x for henry flynt"

...

Before the Velvet Underground formed in 1965, John Cale was playing in a group, the Dream Syndicate, fronted by La Monte Young, who had organized a series of musical events at Yoko Ono's loft. A warning appeared on the announcement for the programs: THE PURPOSE OF THIS SERIES IS NOT ENTERTAINMENT. (Please Kill Me, 4)

...

i'll check them out. as far as which ToEM I've heard, it's just been tracks i've downloaded and i don't know anything about which sessions i've heard, i've just listened to them.

also, i can't argue with the suggestion to listen LOUD and with full bass. i'll do that, thanks. i typically listen to things on headphones, but not always loud. time to crank up my receiver.

transfers of hissy cassettes + mp3 artifacts = most unlistenable combination ever -- downloading this is no way to hear it, and even the available CD bootlegs are dubs of dubs you need some imagination to get to -- and this music will hurt you on headphones or shuffle play. next time you're in new york, if you can stop by the dream house installation, I think you'll be able to hear the tapes differently.

there needs to be an official release soon -- now that the internet's been flooded, his (precious) reputation is actually being hurt by the legions of mistagged poor fidelity files that people are downloading. a friend worked as an intern at the dream house and said he's still in denial over the whole filesharing thing, he had the interns sitting around googling his pieces and sending angry e-mails to individual users demanding they be taken down... a hopeless fight

would love to hear that "Just Charles & Cello" piece

has anyone heard the Anthony Braxton & Wolf Eyes recordings? i'm still trying to find that.

totally disagree. the maclise stuff is gold (nor do i hear much of a difference between "brain damage..." and the rest).

I'm posting your article for you stence

http://www.geocities.com/hstencil/tonyconrad2.html

Maybe try the label? http://victo.qc.ca/

there's a boot of this on slsk. only listened a couple of times, but i remember it being really good.

What seems like the most fundamental difference between this stuff and Karnatak or Hindustani music (and of course there are many) is that non-Pandit Pran Nath Indian classical music is [simplification ahead] in fact quite linear and organized around climax and release (and, at least in the case of Karnatak music, based on pre-composed melodic songs with a strong regular rhythmic basis). ToEM on the other hand is quite intentionally static, making the drone aspect the whole point in a way that it never is in ICM. For me, this is what keeps it interesting and keeps it from just being a bad imitation of Indian music. It's worthwhile to note, however, that this is also the way Western listeners have often misunderstood Indian classical music, hearing it as static ambient music because they focus on the drone (since we are used to associating linear progression with harmonic change in the West). The question of exoticism does come up.

(In any case, I've got to say that a good Karnatak performance ultimately does a lot more for me than "Early Tuesday Morning Blues," no matter how important that piece was to me. I really don't get the sense that Young and Maclise had the mastery of good Karnatak or Hindustani performers.)

Well-Tuned Piano is awesome though, despite its obviously impractical length.

uh, no, within the space of 3 years (64-67 okay four years i guess if you count 64) the membership changed a lot. went from percussion driven (with maclise and billy name) to cale/conrad entering, to la monte switching from sax to voice, to cale/conrad departing, etc.

Day of the Niagara did the whole thing a grave disservice, I've always thought. Like Young was playing a sick joke by making the official release the worst recording I've heard of ToEM.

okay this makes me think i should totally discount what you wrote up above (and below this sentence) because you obviously don't know that this was NOT an official release by any means at all. in fact, la monte was pretty fucking pissed off that tote put out "day of niagra." there has never been, and probably never will be, an "official" toem release.

I guess that despite a lot of the personnel changes, the basic affect of the music doesn't change that much for me. (There's a distinction between the stuff with percussion and the stuff without and between the sax stuff and the voice stuff but I don't think I really need more than a couple tracks of any one of those modes.) Your point is taken, though.

it's kind of key to note that perhaps the lousy sound of the recording has to do with it being like a fourth-generation tape released - even if you want to get all ahistorical and completely ignore the entire context of the dream syndicate's history, the role of the dissidents cale and conrad, how the release came into being (ie. a tape given to arnold dreyblatt got released), etc. so i think it's completely fair to discount your opinion since it's based on a fallacy - that young would assent to release a tape that sounds like ass.

Comments: Immediate shipping. Original disc #4 will not play but we have a copy we made from our set that we will send you.

Oh, it would be fair to discount this part. I thought you meant you were discounting the next two paragraphs of my post (which were not mainly referring to DotN) based on this.

and i do think it's fair to discount the rest of what you wrote about toem because you don't seem particularly knowledgeable about it - which admittedly i find strange because you're usually pretty astute, esp. on this kinda stuff. but hey that's the breaks.

Fuck, I mean, how many awesome artists from this time period fell prey to their own fascination with an "exotic," "mystical" concept of The East? Lame. It's the hippie equivalent of finding Jesus.

I would probably not have brought it up otherwise.)

xpost

about as good as the faust/conrad collaboration if not as ground-breaking

I began to hear music that La Monte Young was playing at the same time all of this Fluxus stuff was bubbling up, and that seemed to be a kind of resuscitation of his interest in jazz, but very, very powerfully inflected by a drone base. And I thought at that time, I would like to do this [music]. I could play drone in this setting, and I had been doing in line with ideas that had been evolving in this mix with my regular communication with Henry Flynt, and talking to La Monte, and so forth, and hearing music, and spending a lot of time sitting in a room just playing repetitive chords on a guitar for like an hour, things like that. I thought, well, jeez this would be a very interesting thing, maybe there’s a music that can be founded on some of these principles not in a context such as the Indian tradition, or the 17th Century tradition, but in the context of the vacuum that Cage leaves where you have a great sense of aesthetic ambiguity or even abandonment: relativism. . . . There’s a question as to what the composer is going to do in this environment, and it seemed like one outcome would be for the ‘composer’ to radically abandon the function of writing music altogether. And to instead supplant that role by direct involvement in the sound.

don't expect reissues anytime soon, whenever other record labels try to negotiate with him for a reissue or new release (either of his material, or music by other composers in his archive like Terry Jennings or Richard Maxfield, or of course the other improvisers in TOTE), they are met with extreme financial and logistical demands that make the projects impossible. it's deadlock, it looks like we're all just going to have to wait.

I've only heard one tape of him playing, but based on that one tape, I think you're probably right

(go to track 5)

conrad perfected the blazing drone but jennings could spin out those subtle microtonal tunes

milton, you're right. (But can I at least submit that there's a difference between saying that all the art music of a huge country with a long history, which comprises at least two major and very distinct musical traditions, sounds the same and saying that everything made by one group in New York in the mid-60s more or less feels the same?) [To ward off potential pedants, I know that India's history as an independent country only goes back 60 years. Still.] I was just giving a totally subjective opinion based on incomplete knowledge (which I admitted). I even said I'm willing to be convinced. (So it seems a little strange to me that someone would want to 'discount' this. Maybe the tone of my first post was a bit flippant?) Based on the recordings I've heard, it doesn't seem ludicrous to think that the classic ToEM is interesting and enjoyable but somewhat limited in affective scope. But you guys clearly disagree and I'd sincerely love to hear more about what I'm missing. I'm here to learn too. What different feelings or experiences do you get from the many different pieces? Are there any spectacular recordings I might be missing out on (aside from what's upthread, which I will keep an eye out for)?

I've never been to the Dream House BTW and I'm totally willing to believe that a lot is lost in the sound quality of even the better ToEM recordings.

tony conrad, from an interview i conducted with him in 1998.

I've never been to the Dream House BTW and I'm totally willing to believe that a lot is lost in the sound quality of even the better ToEM recordings.

it's also important to remember that those recordings are over 40 years old, and who knows how well they are preserved aside from la monte? not to mention they were definitely recorded on equipment we'd consider very lo-fi today.

Die Zweck is cool because it gives you an overview of most of the major pieces, but for listening I like some of the other boots better

24" vinyl.

ok yeah how in hell did they master a 40 minute album side?

http://classicalconnection.blogspot.com/

certainly i've heard comments from their peers (ie other new-york based drone artists) which suggest the mythological penumbra was all-too cynically effective in re eg funding and attention

rivalry and jealousy may be behind some of this sniping -- but at least one of the snipers was in every other respect amiable and generous towards the project (ie he said, the music's great, the religion's bullshit except insofar as it helps them get the music out)

ALSO - there's SOMETHING in this music - esp (ahem) when consumed in combo w/ yknow mind-altering whatsits - that has an ineffable, timeless, transcendent quality, regardless of one's own scepticism or o/wise towards the houses of the holy

cameron's initial post clearly invests quite a lot in the belief side of the project (albeit negatively) -- you can say the belief stuff is inconsequential quality-wise (as i guess you might with, say, bach and his faith) but it isn't inconsequential in terms of subsequent conditions-of-possibility, i don't think it's so negligeable (ie it has real-life consqeuences, which shape later work)

i think manipulativeness is always interesting, because it's always there in art (by definition really), and the good side of it is so intertwined with the dark side -- i find young more explicable (and in a way deeper) if you start from the idea that he's a fake mystic (compared to, i dunno, nusrat fateh ali khan, who i'd say was the real thing)

of course trhere is notoriously in this territory the phenomenon of the "fake medium" that -- despite their best efforts to be croooked -- real actual spirits choose to speak through! (cf ghost) (and the gossip-history of theosophy)

as far as someone who isn't above a bit of manipulation while studiously building his own myth: http://www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine/archives/conrad.html

haha re conrad: i know i'm being coy abt who my source -- cz when he wz talkin to me abt young he asked for it to be off the record who was saying it -- but it isn't conrad

you are a moron. when did i say that orientalism started with hippies? I said that they were one group with a bunch of people who indulged in an orientalist mindset.

but in your own words, "but hey that's ahistorical bullshit retards on the internets for ya, i guess."

if your own pretentious ego is reliant on my personal enjoyment, or lack thereof, of one specific La Monte Young project, that's just sad. i said i appreciate the influence, but i don't enjoy the recordings. please read all responses before saying stupid shit. thanks.

Milton said:

"his (precious) reputation is actually being hurt by the legions of mistagged poor fidelity files that people are downloading"

this is true, and for me there's an even further component, which is that maybe the emperor has no clothes, or at least much lamer clothes than he needs to maintain said reputation. an interesting example is MEV, who I think were decidedly more respected before Alga Marghen put out the first CD in what was supposed to be a 10 CD series documenting them. not sure whatever happened to the other 9, but I know that I see MEV namechecked a lot less since then.

as for Radigue, I'd take her catalog over Conrad/Young/Riley/Reich combined, but my taste doesn't tend to overlap with many people's on this site, so just FWIW.

of course I don't agree that the emperor has no clothes, though by this point 80% of what you download with Young's name on it won't make the best argument for his music. there's a lot of other music that should get mentioned at least as frequently as Young does, but ToTE predates almost all of it and was an acknowledged influence on a lot of these people who saw their's concerts (including Radigue), there's a reason for the rep

never heard any good MEV, I think they were always a mess. maybe side 2 of Leave The City in a time-capsule sort of way but that's not even the real group.

Rome Cansrt and United Patchwork have never done much for me, though.

And I love love love those La Monte Young pieces floating around on the net... "Volga Delta", "Soundtone Installation" and the long "Drift Study" are probably my favorites. The rest isn't too shabby either. Far from an "emperor has no clothes" reaction, they renewed my interest considerably.

(Just a note that my not-even-all-that-critical-anyway comments upthread were specifically about ToEM [based on what bootlegs I've heard], not about Young in general. As I said, Well-Tuned Piano is truly great and I like The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from The Four Dreams of China.)

They are on the German 4xCD mentioned earlier, except for the long "Drift Study" which is from the Shandar LP.

i don't disagree with your distinctions between the two, in fact they're pretty obvious, perhaps even to the point of not even worth pointing them out. like, since when did the toem participants claim what they were doing WAS somehow a part of or related to icm? they didn't. they were inspired by icm - but only one specific part of it, ie. the drone - which whether you like it or not exists, and not just to western ears. tony conrad would probably be claim to be just as influenced by biber or bill monroe as by ali akbar khan.

and i do think it's fair to discount the rest of what you wrote about toem because you don't seem particularly knowledgeable about it - which admittedly i find strange because you're usually pretty astute, esp. on this kinda stuff. but hey that's the breaks.

― hstencil (hstencil), Friday, January 12, 2007 5:33 AM (4 years ago) Bookmark

RIP stencil long may u deride