Tonight on A Different Nature, we present the music of Tony Conrad, who passed away in April of this year. Tony Conrad was a composer, sound artist, teacher, avant-garde film maker, and sound artist. He got his start in music in New York in the 1960s, as a member of the Theater of Eternal Music, also known as the Dream Syndacate, along with La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, John Cale, and Angus MacLise. This group used just intonation and sustained drones to produce an early form of what eventually became known as "drone music." He also played in an early rock band with Cale and Lou Reed called the Primitives, before Reed and Cale went on to start the Velvet Underground.
Conrad later colaborated with the German group Faust, Genisis P-Orridge, Charlemagne Palestine, Keijo Haino, Jim O'Rourke, David Grubs, C Spencer Yeh, Tovah Olson and many others, and he's released solo works of amplified violin with special scales and tunings. He is one of the pioneers of minimalist and drone music, and tonight we'll hear a variety of peices from his oeuvre.
- KBOO