Browse by Artist: CONRAD, TONY

Artist:	CONRAD, TONY
Title:	Early Minimalism: Volume One
Label:	TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS
Format:	4CD
Price:	$42.00
Catalog #:	TOE 033CD

Repressed! Four CD box set with 96-page book and enhanced CD-ROM featuring interviews, performance footage and video scores. Includes the massive "Four Violins" (1964) -- one of the world's most important and space-inhaling pieces of music ever, which was only briefly available on LP. Mainline it as loud as you possibly can. Plus: "Early Minimalism: April, 1965" (for solo violin and string quartet) ; "Early Minimalism: May 1965" [performed here by Conrad, Alexandria Gelencser (cello) and Jim O'Rourke (violin)]; "Early Minimalism: June 1965" (studio work for four multitracked violins with cello). "The story becomes familiar: In 1962 Tony Conrad's amplified strings introduced the sustained drone of just-intonation into 'minimal' music. Conrad, together with John Cale, Angus MacLise, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela formed a performance collaboration from 1962-65 sometimes known as the Dream Syndicate. Utilizing long durations and precise pitch, their aggressively mesmerizing 'Dream Music' denied the activity of composition, articulated their shared ideas of performance, and established the Big Bang of 'minimalism'. When this remarkable group dissolved in 1966, their many rehearsal and performance recordings were repressed by Young and Zazeela, and remain unheard to this day. Conrad himself stepped outside of the Dream Syndicate once: on December 19, 1964 he recorded 'Four Violins', his only 1960s solo tape of violin playing. In 1987 Conrad set out on a return expedition to the site of these fragments to unearth the losses; the result is the epic 'Early Minimalism'. The finds of 'Early Minimalism' are richest at the place where 'Four Violins' was pointing, where the lost Dream Music would have fully realized its harmonic and expressive potential. Reaching back through time, Early Minimalism weaves a mobile narrative of minimalism: making music out of history, and history out of music."

Artist:	CONRAD, TONY
Title:	Joan of Arc
Label:	TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS
Format:	CD
Price:	$16.00
Catalog #:	TOE 077CD

"Tony Conrad is a founding father of 'minimalism' and a giant in the American soundscape. The indefatigable Conrad kept busy during the Revolution Summer of 1968. In addition to his reunion recordings with John Cale (documented in the Cale set New York in the 1960s), Conrad starred in Ira Cohen's legendary film The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda and made extensive solo recordings, including 'Joan of Arc', available here for the first time. One of Conrad's personal favorites, it's a long piece for pump organ, in which he conjures both searing white heat and malignant gothic dread. An excerpt was used as the soundtrack for the Piero Heliczer film of the same name, but Conrad feels a greater affinity with that year's Cohen film; accordingly, Cohen graciously provided restored stills from Thunderbolt Pagoda for the packaging of this release. Cohen's sumptuous imagery -- which Jimi Hendrix described as 'looking through butterfly wings' -- features a blissed-out and shirtless Conrad replete in pencil mustache, mascara and blood-red turban. The man is just downright cool -- about as cool as Hendrix, and almost always louder."

Artist:	CONRAD, TONY
Title:	Fantastic Glissando
Label:	TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS
Format:	CD
Price:	$16.00
Catalog #:	TOE 082CD

"It's 1969, and Tony Conrad wants to take you Higher. Celebrated for the thrilling roar of his amplified violin, Conrad is a founding father of 'minimalism' and a giant in the American soundscape. Now Conrad's own Audio ArtKive imprint presents the first in a series of releases that reveal the wild breadth of his 40-year career, including field recordings, piano compositions, film soundtracks and more. Fantastic Glissando (1969) is a series of (d)evolving electronic compositions created with sine-wave oscillators. The instrumentation is different, but the effect is typical Conrad: soaring, aggressively textured and jet-engine massive. This first-time CD release contains an extra ten-minute bonus track not included on the original LP version."

Artist:	CONRAD, TONY
Title:	Bryant Park Moratorium Rally (1969)
Label:	TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS
Format:	CD
Price:	$16.00
Catalog #:	TOE 083CD

"An October afternoon in 1969. Midtown Manhattan. A rally in Bryant Park against the Vietnam War. Down 42nd Street towards Times Square, Tony Conrad is adjusting microphones in his 5th floor loft, one directed at the TV set -- where it will pick up live local news coverage -- the other pointing out the window, where the echo of speeches and crowd noise mingles with the oceanic rush of crosstown traffic. As the event is about to begin, he rolls tape. Thirty-four years later, we hear what he heard. And the juncture, for so many reasons, could not be more critical. As the Bush Administration pursues a risky military agenda in the Middle East -- one with unsettling long-term implications both at home and abroad -- we see a nation not divided, as in the Vietnam Era, but strangely complacent. Our media-saturated reality functions like a drug, instantly televised warfare a new entertainment, and organized public dissent a novelty at home and a roaring chorus everywhere else. Conrad's recording of the Oct. 15 Vietnam Moratorium Rally is an eerie flashback that offers urgent new insights into our own lives and times, post-9/11 and full on into a new millennium."

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