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LP
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BNSD 017LP
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[sold out] Accurately described by Thurston Moore as "great for meditating to the cosmos," Terry Riley's classic Descending Moonshine Dervishes is available again in a limited edition repress. Originally recorded live in Berlin in 1975 and released by Kuckuck in 1982, Beacon Sound reissued the album in 2016 to widespread acclaim. Using just intonation and a modified organ, Riley conjures forth a rich and layered sound that challenges the Western ear, reflecting his associations with Indian classical singer Pandit Pran Nath and La Monte Young, whose Well Tuned Piano was well underway. Descending Moonshine Dervishes is a virtuosic and kaleidoscopic performance, standing as one of the finest works of a revolutionary composer and musician at the height of his powers. Recorded in concert November 29, 1975 at Metamusik Festival in Berlin. Originally mastered by Stephen Hill. Remastered in 2016 by Rafael Anton Irisarri. Front cover painting by Helmut Zimmermann. Back cover photography by Roberto Masotti.
"Descending Moonshine Dervishes' dates from 1975 and it belongs to a larger Dervish series of compositions whose origins predate Riley's two signature works of minimalism, 'In C' (1968) and 'A Rainbow In Curved Air' (1969)? (the piece is) structured around just intonation, which stretches the listening experience into new areas. Played on a Yamaha organ with a bit of tape delay that allows Riley to duet with himself, the music of Descending Moonshine Dervishes is an ear expansion that goes through skittering arpeggios and long, droning notes that indicate something of the many levels that it operates on." --Louise Gray, The Wire Magazine (2017)
"Terry Riley has become a totemic presence in music over the past half-century." --The Guardian
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CD
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EF 102CD
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2008 release. "Throughout the 1970s, legendary American composer Terry Riley toured regularly in Europe, performing solo organ concerts. In October 1978, Riley's personal technician Chester Wood built a stereo digital delay out of an ancient computer he had procured from Don Buchla, and the subsequent tour was the maiden voyage to try it out. Riley's specially modified two-manual Yamaha YC-45D portable combo organ had a Just Intonation setting and allowed him to feed stereo signals to the digital delay. The Yamaha had been manufactured with single mono output, but now with the modification it had a separate output for each manual eventuating in four channels (two live and two delayed). During a residency as a Fellow at DAAD in Berlin, Riley fine-tuned the delay speeds and experimented with different stereo combinations so that by the time of this Paris concert, the tape delays worked well with the tempos he was using. This all came on the heels of the Shri Camel recording Riley had just made in San Francisco for CBS. The musical materials of The Last Camel in Paris are second generational, belonging to the Shri Camel family while manifesting their own distinct shape and flavor."
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CD
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ANGELICA 050CD
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Organum for Stefano, the third record that I Dischi di Angelica dedicates to the work of Terry Riley, represents a significant example of "coming full circle": indeed, in 1997 AngelicA Festival organized a concert in Bologna for Terry Riley and Stefano Scodanibbio -- it was their first tour together, and the beginning of a collaboration that would last for years, promoting their first album Lazy Afternoon Among the Crocodiles, recorded in the Shri Moonshine studio in Riley's home between 1994 and 1995. After his magnificent piano solo at the 2000 edition, AngelicA invited Riley back in 2013 to dedicate a special tribute-portrait to him, presenting his music in a series of concerts held in three different cities (Bologna, Modena, and Lugo), with different line-ups: The 3 Generations Trio (with Tracy Silverman and Gyan Riley); the ARTE saxophone quartet from Switzerland; and indeed a concert, commissioned as a world premiere, dedicated to Stefano Scodanibbio who had passed away the year before, in January 2012. The venue selected for the concert was the Basilica of Santa Maria dei Servi, hence Riley decided to use its historic Tamburini opus 544 pipe organ for the concert paying homage to the memory of Stefano. The organ was built in 1968 based on a design by Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini, with a total of approximately 5000 pipes divided into 60 registers.
As Riley himself explains in the liner notes: "... Stefano and I had a long history of touring and playing concerts together and one of the features of our concerts was always an arrangement of a vocal raga for bass, voice and tamboura. Stefano, although not trained in Indian classical music, had an uncanny ear for the right choices in pitch and rhythm to accompany my traditional vocal renditions. Two of Stefano's favorite ragas were Malkauns and Bageshri, late night ragas with deep feelings ideally suited to the profound sounds emanating from his string bass. The concert was completely improvised, introducing the melodies of ragas Malkauns and Bageshri, both vocally and in the harmonized organ passages of an intuitively structured form. The last section is an improvisation upon the passages of my composition 'Simply M...', a piece I frequently played for Stefano."
The result was a very precious concert -- the only official recording of Riley on the pipe organ -- which ranges from minimalism to Indian music, grandiose Bachian architectural constructions, even progressive echoes -- in a kaleidoscopic flow of ideas which, both spontaneously and with a great clarity of intention, travels through moments and reminiscences of the respective musical identities and experiences shared by the two musicians.
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CD
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ANGELICA 034CD
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2016 release. Here is the high priest of minimalism with the The 3 Generations Trio, a line-up featuring Terry Riley himself on synthesizer, piano, vocals, and harmonizer, Gyan Riley on electric and acoustic guitars, and Tracy Silverman on acoustic and electric violins. An extremely cohesive group playing highly enchanting music. A fascinating sonic trip (often driven by Riley's unique vocal ragas), through different music traditions. Asian, African as well as western classical and jazz, reworked through modern aesthetics. In one word: outstanding.
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LP
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MOVCL 046LP
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"Keyboard virtuoso Terry Riley started experimenting with different instruments in the '50s. One of his electronic music landmarks is his third album A Rainbow In Curved Air. Through the use of overdubbing, he recorded all the instruments to feature on the title track. The composition consists of three movements, each representing another part of his musical influences. As the song progresses, its structure goes through frequent changes. It's a colorful, psychedelic, atmospheric and revolutionary song. The second track consists of a loop of saxophones and is the dreamy and calm opposite of the title track. Fans of electronic music, such as Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, would love this record. Taking inspiration from Hindustani classical music and jazz techniques, Riley's masterpiece influenced many musicians, from the likes of Brian Eno to Emeralds. A Rainbow In Curved Air 50th anniversary limited edition is available as 500 individually numbered copies on transparent vinyl."
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2LP
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SSH 004LP
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Limited restock. The classic minimal music album is now available again on vinyl for the first time since the '70s. During the 1970s, Californian composer Terry Riley concentrated on solo keyboard performances, continuing to make music yet writing down almost nothing. Riley selected a mode, chose a few motifs or basic patterns and then, seated on the floor in front of his audience, improvised on electronic keyboard. The electric organ, superseded at later concerts by a synthesizer, was portable and consistent. By the early '70s, Riley had come to feel that scores were a distraction. Faithful interpretation of an already written piece was a deviation from the true purpose of making music, which was spiritual quest. Fortunately, some of those live performances were captured on tape. Persian Surgery Dervishes, issued initially on the French label Shandar in 1972, features two such concerts for electric organ and reel-to-reel delay, one recorded in Los Angeles on April 18th, 1971, the other in Paris on May 24th, 1972. At the start of that decade, Riley became a dedicated student of the great Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath. Looking into North Indian classical tradition, he found correspondences to modal and cyclic ideas that he was already working on. In 1971, Riley started teaching Indian music at Mills College, in Oakland. That experience fed directly into his solo keyboard performances, but other influences were also shaping his music. Personal research into ancient Persian culture and the poetry of Rumi lit up his imagination, while the repetitive swirling of Sufi devotional music from North Africa and jazz, an enduring source of inspiration, reverberate through these performances. The Californian version of Persian Surgery Dervishes starts with low dark tones, dense and brooding like a huddled human figure, deep in introspection. But as the improvisation unfolds Riley's buoyant spirit asserts itself, spiraling out in ecstatic coils. The Parisian concert conveys a different mood, brighter and more open in texture, more relaxed from the outset and breathing with greater freedom as it takes flight. Persian Surgery Dervishes is a mesmerizing record of a vital stage in Riley's ongoing quest for connection with the universal mind and sublime music. "Music is my spiritual path. It's my way of finding out who I am." --Terry Riley, 1976 Includes insert with liner notes by Julian Cowley; Lacquer cut by Rashad Becker; Layout by Jeroen Wille; Remastered by Equusl; Licensed from FGL Productions.
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LP
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P 749408HLP
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2024 restock. 180 gram exact repro reissue of this minimalist masterpiece, originally released in 1969. "All the music on this recording is played by Terry. In 'A Rainbow' he plays electric organ, electric harpsichord, rocksichord, dumbec and tambourine. 'Poppy Nogood' is for soprano saxophone and electric organ. The spatially separated mirror images were adapted for studio recording by Glen Kolotkin and resemble the sound Terry gets in his all-night concerts."
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CD
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EF 101CD
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2022 restock. "After changing the world in the late '60s with In C and A Rainbow in Curved Air, legendary American composer and father of minimalism Terry Riley abandoned tape manipulation and written composition to concentrate on longform keyboard cycles and improvisations. In the early '70s, while in Europe, he was invited to create scores for two films. The first, in 1972, was Joel Santoni's Les Yeux Fermés, a feature-length art film that instantly became a cult classic by virtue of its never having screened in the USA. The second, Lifespan, directed by Alexander Whitelaw in 1974, featured Klaus Kinski. Both soundtracks were released in limited editions on LP and have long been out-of-print. This first-ever CD release of these two classic Terry Riley soundtracks -- both on one disc -- was remastered from the original tapes, the hypnotic songs sounding far superior to the below-average vinyl pressings. Having brought the '60s Corti archive back into print, Elision Fields now turns its attention to the under-examined crucial period of Riley's work -- the '60s."
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CD
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EF 104CD
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"This CD represents the first album by Terry Riley, originally released in 1966, as well as the first recordings Riley made using his two personal Revox reel-to-reel tape machines (or 'Time Lag Accumulators') later heard on his groundbreaking Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band All Night Flight. Reed Streams has been remastered from the original tapes. In addition, this edition includes a psychedelic big-band version of 'In C (Mantra)' recorded under the direction of renowned Canadian composer and conductor Walter Boudreau in 1970."
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