La Monte Young on record
- Issue #178 (December '98) | Essays
- By: Edwin Pouncey | Featuring: La Monte Young
- Printable version
Edwin Pouncey surveys La Monte Young's recorded legacy
Those in search of La Monte Young's music on record face a daunting, if not impossible challenge: none of his works are currently available. For a composer of his stature, it is a scandalous situation, especially now that his influence on the shape of contemporary music is becoming more evident.
From the late 60s to the early 90s, Young's recorded legacy was issued by a series of obscure labels and esoteric art publications, all of which have since disappeared. Arguably his most important work to date, The Well-Tuned Piano, managed to obtain a release through the relatively accessible jazz label Gramavision, only for it to get deleted when the label was taken over by Rykodisc.
Granted, Young is not the easiest composer to record. His music doesn't readily comply with the time limits of either vinyl or CD albums. His compositions are based on a kind of timelessness, where sound and light (courtesy of his partner Marian Zazeela) are allowed to develop and grow, almost organically, over a period of days, weeks, months and even years. What recordings Young has made (The Well-Tuned Piano excluded) are just fragments of a huge body of work, most of it unheard outside the circles of artists involved in its making.
Young's first recordings were published in the late 60s by two New York based art magazines. In both cases, his music was just one element in a series of elaborate 'multiples' made up of posters, booklets, film strips, flexidiscs and tape reels. His Excerpt From Drift Study 4:37:40 - 5:09:50pm 5 VIII 68 was issued by SMS magazine as a one-quarter inch tape on a five inch reel housed in a box specially designed by Marian Zazeela. Of the 40 copies made, only two dozen were sent out to subscribers, while the rest were either lost or stolen. In 1983 a cassette version was authorised - for which Zazeela provided a newly designed box - which was sold with the remaining sets of the magazine. Young realised Excerpt from frequency and amplitude ratios tuned on a Moog synthesizer. By utilising its sinewave oscillators, mixer and lowpass filter, Young produced a throbbing, mesmerising Moog growl that became the blueprint for what was to follow.
In 1969 Aspen magazine published Young's Excerpt From Drift Study 31 1 69 12:17:33 - 12:49:58pm as one side of a flexidisc in an issue with the subtitle, "Art Information And Science Information Share The Same World And Language. . .". The edition was curated by the artist Dan Graham, and designed by George Maciunas. A 1973 Dream House Excerpt from Young was included on the CD, Fluxus Anthology/Recorthings, released as an art gallery edition in 1989.
Young and Zazeela recorded their first full length album 20 years earlier in Munich for Heiner Friedrich's Edition X label. It was Friedrich who later found the couple's Dream House in Harrison Street, New York. A limited edition of 2000, 98 of which were signed and dated by the artists, it came to be known as The Black Record, thanks to Zazeela's black on black cover and label artwork. Side one is a section of Map Of 49's Dream, performed by Young on sinewave drone and voice, with vocal accompaniment by Zazeela. Side two's extract from Study For The Bowed Disc features the duo bowing a gong given to them by sculptor Robert Morris. He had made it for his dance piece, War, and asked Young to play it for the performance. Afterwards Morris presented the gong to Young, and he started to experiment on it with double bass bows. If you follow Young's recommendation to turn it up and play it slow, the resulting low, thrilling drone is at once spiritual and slightly threatening, as though dark forces are being summoned to the surface. Long before Keiji Haino adopted black to shroud himself and his work, Marian Zazeela was embedding her calligraphic lettering and designs in purple and black. The point is to focus on her artwork while concentrating on the vocal/sinewave drones of Young's dream music.
In 1974 the couple were approached by French experimental label Shandar to record a Theatre Of Eternal Music album. The resulting Dream House 78' 17" again featured two side-long pieces. Jon Hassell (trumpet) and Garrett List (trombone) joined the couple for a rendition of 13 1 73 5:35 - 6:14:03pm NYC, excerpted from Young's epic, continuous performance work The Tortoise, His Dreams And Journeys, while the second side was taken up with a further Drift Study. Hassell's and List's contributions to the Tortoise piece grafted fresh flesh on to Young's original vision, coaxing the eternally slumbering tortoise to poke its head out of its jewel encrusted shell and sniff the city air. There is also more than a hint of the massive influence that classical Indian singer Pandit Pran Nath had on Young's music during this period. The assembled voices tuned to their sinewaves and instruments eventually swell into a mass chorus of Asian adopted drone that rolls gently back and forth to produce a deep trance effect.
Pran Nath's influence on Young's music started showing in 1971, when he, Young and Zazeela teamed up to record Ragas for Shandar. Featuring Young and Shyam Bhatnagar on tambouras, and tabla player Fayyaz Khan, with cover calligraphy by Zazeela, the full impact of 'India's Master Musician' was set loose on Western ears through two beautifully rendered traditional ragas. This experiment was repeated (using different musicians) in 1986 on Ragas Of Morning & Night. The album was released on Gramavision, the last label to date to take on La Monte Young's musical dreams and journeys into the unknown.
From the late 60s to the early 90s, Young's recorded legacy was issued by a series of obscure labels and esoteric art publications, all of which have since disappeared. Arguably his most important work to date, The Well-Tuned Piano, managed to obtain a release through the relatively accessible jazz label Gramavision, only for it to get deleted when the label was taken over by Rykodisc.
Granted, Young is not the easiest composer to record. His music doesn't readily comply with the time limits of either vinyl or CD albums. His compositions are based on a kind of timelessness, where sound and light (courtesy of his partner Marian Zazeela) are allowed to develop and grow, almost organically, over a period of days, weeks, months and even years. What recordings Young has made (The Well-Tuned Piano excluded) are just fragments of a huge body of work, most of it unheard outside the circles of artists involved in its making.
Young's first recordings were published in the late 60s by two New York based art magazines. In both cases, his music was just one element in a series of elaborate 'multiples' made up of posters, booklets, film strips, flexidiscs and tape reels. His Excerpt From Drift Study 4:37:40 - 5:09:50pm 5 VIII 68 was issued by SMS magazine as a one-quarter inch tape on a five inch reel housed in a box specially designed by Marian Zazeela. Of the 40 copies made, only two dozen were sent out to subscribers, while the rest were either lost or stolen. In 1983 a cassette version was authorised - for which Zazeela provided a newly designed box - which was sold with the remaining sets of the magazine. Young realised Excerpt from frequency and amplitude ratios tuned on a Moog synthesizer. By utilising its sinewave oscillators, mixer and lowpass filter, Young produced a throbbing, mesmerising Moog growl that became the blueprint for what was to follow.
In 1969 Aspen magazine published Young's Excerpt From Drift Study 31 1 69 12:17:33 - 12:49:58pm as one side of a flexidisc in an issue with the subtitle, "Art Information And Science Information Share The Same World And Language. . .". The edition was curated by the artist Dan Graham, and designed by George Maciunas. A 1973 Dream House Excerpt from Young was included on the CD, Fluxus Anthology/Recorthings, released as an art gallery edition in 1989.
Young and Zazeela recorded their first full length album 20 years earlier in Munich for Heiner Friedrich's Edition X label. It was Friedrich who later found the couple's Dream House in Harrison Street, New York. A limited edition of 2000, 98 of which were signed and dated by the artists, it came to be known as The Black Record, thanks to Zazeela's black on black cover and label artwork. Side one is a section of Map Of 49's Dream, performed by Young on sinewave drone and voice, with vocal accompaniment by Zazeela. Side two's extract from Study For The Bowed Disc features the duo bowing a gong given to them by sculptor Robert Morris. He had made it for his dance piece, War, and asked Young to play it for the performance. Afterwards Morris presented the gong to Young, and he started to experiment on it with double bass bows. If you follow Young's recommendation to turn it up and play it slow, the resulting low, thrilling drone is at once spiritual and slightly threatening, as though dark forces are being summoned to the surface. Long before Keiji Haino adopted black to shroud himself and his work, Marian Zazeela was embedding her calligraphic lettering and designs in purple and black. The point is to focus on her artwork while concentrating on the vocal/sinewave drones of Young's dream music.
In 1974 the couple were approached by French experimental label Shandar to record a Theatre Of Eternal Music album. The resulting Dream House 78' 17" again featured two side-long pieces. Jon Hassell (trumpet) and Garrett List (trombone) joined the couple for a rendition of 13 1 73 5:35 - 6:14:03pm NYC, excerpted from Young's epic, continuous performance work The Tortoise, His Dreams And Journeys, while the second side was taken up with a further Drift Study. Hassell's and List's contributions to the Tortoise piece grafted fresh flesh on to Young's original vision, coaxing the eternally slumbering tortoise to poke its head out of its jewel encrusted shell and sniff the city air. There is also more than a hint of the massive influence that classical Indian singer Pandit Pran Nath had on Young's music during this period. The assembled voices tuned to their sinewaves and instruments eventually swell into a mass chorus of Asian adopted drone that rolls gently back and forth to produce a deep trance effect.
Pran Nath's influence on Young's music started showing in 1971, when he, Young and Zazeela teamed up to record Ragas for Shandar. Featuring Young and Shyam Bhatnagar on tambouras, and tabla player Fayyaz Khan, with cover calligraphy by Zazeela, the full impact of 'India's Master Musician' was set loose on Western ears through two beautifully rendered traditional ragas. This experiment was repeated (using different musicians) in 1986 on Ragas Of Morning & Night. The album was released on Gramavision, the last label to date to take on La Monte Young's musical dreams and journeys into the unknown.