Good morning.
Today we’re listening to Terry Riley, an American composer and keyboardist. We last featured him in 2019, so we’re due. Born in 1935 in the Sierra Nevada mountains, Riley studied classical piano and became inspired by boundary-pushing musicians like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Miles Davis.1 He’s best known for the minimalist compositions A Rainbow in Curved Air and In C, which use tape loops to explore the emergent properties of musical repetition. Today we’re playing two lesser known Riley records. Les Yeux Fermés & Lifespan is a reissue of two film scores that Riley originally composed and recorded in the early ‘70s.2 Shri Camel from 1980 is a shimmering, spontaneous performance on a custom Yamaha YC-45D organ.3
Les Yeux Fermés & Lifespan - Terry Riley (70m, vocals on track 6)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal
Shri Camel - Terry Riley (40m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal
We wish you a great start to your week.
Louisiana Channel, whose short documentary on Riley is well worth the watch
My earlier comment prompted me to go listen to PSD and, while doing that, I discovered ANOTHER similar recording, only released a few years ago - Live in Cologne 1974. Amazing trippy organ pyschedelia!
Love Terry Riley. His Paris and Los Angeles Concerts from the 1970s, released as Persian Surgery Dervishes, is also a standout.