LA MONTE YOUNG™ MARIAN ZAZEELA
31 VII 69 10:26 – 10:49 PM/23 VIII 64 2:50:45 – 3:11 AM The Volga Delta
(reissue, 1969)
SUPERIOR VIADUCT 9/10 ANGUS MACLISE
Tapes (reissue, 2015)
ART INTO LIFE 8/10 Formative minimalism, psychedelic mysticism: the hidden wiring of the ’60s NYC underground, untangled
MUCH has been written over the past ve decades about the minimalist music made by New York-based composer La Monte Young and his key collaborator and partner Marian Zazeela. Certainly, they’re two of the most signicant gures in 20th-century music: Brian Eno once called Young the “daddy of us all”; their various ensembles have included musicians such as John Cale, Terry Riley, Rhys Chatham, Jon Hassell and Tony Conrad. But their music is, still, little-heard, allowing a cult of personality to accrue around Young and Zazeela, at the expense, perhaps, of a clearer understanding of their music. But if you’ve ever been seduced by the roar of mainlined minimalism, well, here is the source.
Their second album, colloquially known as ‘The Black Record’, is a perfect entry to their world. On “31 VII 69…”, Young and Zazeela sing nasal, guttural tones across a droning sinewave, their performance informed by training with guru Pandit Pran Nath, a master of Indian kirana gharana singing. “Volga Delta” explores the rough, noisy resonances of a bowed gong: a constant shimmer of reective tonality, its intensity recalls, in some ways, the super-loud drone monoliths Young and Zazeela performed in the Theatre Of Eternal Music. That ensemble’s most signicant lineup also included Cale, Conrad and percussionist Angus Maclise, whose Tapes boxset oers another glimpse of New York’s underground.
Reminiscing about
Maclise, Lou Reed once described him as “a dream person”. Certainly, there was something otherworldly about Maclise, who’s best known as The Velvet Underground’s rst drummer. Maclise quit that group in 1965 when he discovered they had a gig, and that he was expected to turn up and start playing at a particular time, for money, which didn’t jive with his embrace of anti-capitalist freedom. Instead, Maclise oated through space and time, a deeply creative gure, and an unheralded instigator. A¤er his time with the Velvets, and the Theatre Of Eternal Music, he crossed paths with Timothy Leary, also his wedding celebrant, and Loudon Wainwright III, who was arrested with Angus and wife Hetty on a drug bust.
But his most important connections were with other Nyunderground gures like Piero Heliczer, Ira Cohen, Jack Smith and Ron Rice. Maclise also travelled through Europe and South Asia during the ’70s, before dying of hypoglycaemia and tuberculosis in Nepal in 1979.
The material on Tapes, mastered by Jim O’rourke, spans these times and places, and it’s life-a rming, unpredictable and expansive. Maclise had preternatural facility with any instrument or sound source, which you can hear throughout, from the jangling strings of “Gamelan #1” to the primitive electronic splurge of “Shortwave Mix”. These three hours of music shi¤ through phases, from meditative to frantic, psychedelic to minimalist, but the core is always Maclise, hooked into the rich humming of the earth: he truly was, as Cale observed, “a dri¤er chasing a¤er his soul”.
JON DALE