Tony Conrad at SXSW 2006

Dan sent me info about this show…

March 2006
16 – Austin, TX – SXSW Table of the Elements Dubnium festival/showcase

with Tony Conrad, Arnold Dreyblatt, Rhys Chatham Guitar Army, Zeena Parkins, Jonathan Kane’s February.

Who is Tony Conrad? Bio after the break..

Profile:
A pioneering force behind the evolution of minimalism, violinist and
composer Tony Conrad introduced the idea of “Eternal Music,” a
droning, mesmerizing performance idiom which employed long durations,
amplification and precise pitch to explore new worlds of sound;
through both his solo work and through collaborations with artists
including LaMonte Young, John Cale and Faust, he forged new creative
directions which proved enormously influential on successive
generations of artists ranging in background from pop to the avant-
garde. Born in Baltimore in 1940, Conrad studied music at Harvard,
where he was first exposed to the work of John Cage and David Tudor;
among his fellow students were David Behrman, Christian Wolff and
Frederic Rzewski, all of whom later pursued careers in experimental
music as well. After graduating in 1962, Conrad relocated to New
York, where he became immersed in the city’s burgeoning underground
music scene; there he first joined forces with composer and
saxophonist LaMonte Young, who at the time was leading an
improvisational group including his wife Marian Zazeela on voice-
drone, Billy Name (later a staple of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene) on
guitar, and Angus MacLise on percussion. Conrad approached Young
about performing with the group, and by 1963 a new line-up also
consisting of Zazeela and the young Welsh musician John Cale began
playing about town in an ensemble variously dubbed The Dream
Syndicate and The Theater of Eternal Music. Sustaining notes for
hours at a time, their improvised dissections of specific harmonic
intervals rejected the compositional process, instead elaborating
shared performance concepts. The Dream Syndicate disbanded in 1965,
with Conrad, Young and Cale all later staking claim to authoring of
the “Eternal Music” aesthetic; Young also held on to the group’s live
tapes. Still, Conrad and Cale continued collaborating, joining young
Pickwick company songwriter Lou Reed and sculptor Walter de Maria in
a rock band called The Primitives, on tour in support of their lone
single, the Reed-penned “Do the Ostrich.” (Conrad also proved a key
contributor to early Velvet Underground lore by giving Reed the S&M
book from which the band derived its name.) By this time, Conrad had
also begun channeling his energies into filmmaking, working as a
sound engineer and technical advisor on the experimental features of
camp icon Jack Smith, including his 1963 masterpiece Flaming
Creatures. In time, Conrad also began directing his own features —
among them The Flicker, Coming Attractions, The Eye of Count
Flickenstein and Film Feedback — also composing their respective
scores. It was through a German filmmaker travelling in New York City
that Conrad first learned of the nascent Kraut-rock scene of the
early ’70s, and he soon began communicating with the members of
Faust. Eventually, he travelled to the group’s farm in the northern
German community of Wuemme, where a three-day session yielded the
1973 collaboration Outside the Dream Syndicate, Conrad’s first-ever
proper recording. Upon returning to the U.S., however, he largely
abandoned performing to accept a teaching position at the University
at Buffalo’s Department of Media Study, a job he continued to hold
throughout the decades which followed; among his students were the
future members of the noise-pop outfit Mercury Rev. Only in 1993,
when Jeff Hunt’s Table of the Elements label reissued Outside the
Dream Syndicate, did Conrad begin considering an active return to
performing; he and Faust both soon appeared live at Hunt’s first
Manganese music festival in Atlanta, and in 1995 Conrad recorded the
album Slapping Pythagoras, his first new work in over two decades.
Next was the single “The Japanese Room at La Pagode,” a collaboration
with Gastr del Sol, and in 1996 he issued Four Violins, a piece
dating back to 1964. A year later, Conrad released Early Minimalism,
a four-disc collection including not only the aforementioned Four
Violins but also newly-recorded recreations of vintage Dream
Syndicate performances. Collaborations with Jim O’Rourke, The Dead C
and Pulp guitarist Mark Webber were all scheduled to follow.