Riley, Terry

Riley, Terry

Descending Moonshine Dervishes

Beacon Sound

***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 manufactured by Optimal in Germany. 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.

Riley, Terry

Archangels

National Sawdust Tracks

The three pieces collected on Terry Riley’s “Archangels” are all first recordings supervised by the composer: “Remember This O Mind,” in a stunning version for eight cellos and eight voices; “Archangels” for eight cellos; and “Madrigal” for eight voices. Produced by Jeffrey Zeigler and recorded at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, these performances feature a number of the finest performers in NYC: Zeigler’s own NOVUS NY Cellists, and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, conducted by Julian Wachner. “As a pioneer of Minimalism, Mr. Riley is often thought of primarily for his rhythmic innovations. ‘Madrigal’ is a reminder of his acute ear for spacious, modal-tinged, haunting harmony.”—Anthony Tommasini, New York Times 10/6/2015

Riley, Terry

Banana Humberto

Sri Moonshine Music

A fifty-minute work in four movements for the Paul Dresher Ensemble with Terry Riley as piano soloist, Banana Humberto takes the form of a chamber concerto and was written specifically for the performance capabilities of the Dresher Ensemble with guest soloist Tracy Silverman on electric viola. The first movement is the most classical in form and content opening with a piano solo that leads to the opening theme. After variations on the opening them the driving secondary subject is introduced and then combined with the opening theme. There follows more secondary themes that lead into the spacious Chorale from which the movement derives its name. Then follows a piano cadenza that leads to the eastern sounding coda, which concludes the movement. The Maze is a labyrinthine movement based on polymetric patterns that float over a 17 beat rhythmic cycle, scored in an open way to allow the ensemble choices on how to assemble the flow of the music. Goodbye Goodtimes Blues for Millennium s Child is Riley’s one Millennium piece, feeling fortunate to be one of those having a foot in both the 20th and 21st centuries... The inspiration was to create an old time blues tune, reminiscent of the music of the 20s and 30s that gives way to a more hard core version of 21st century blues showing how this old American Raga is capable of so many expressions as it crosses over this imaginary time marker. This movement is open to large sections of improvisation. Danzero, a...

Riley, Terry

Last Camel In Paris

Elision Fields

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.

Riley, Terry

Music For The Gift

Elision Fields

This CD brings together four seminal tape works of Terry Riley.   The Gift music was performed in Paris 1963 by Chet Baker, with tape manipulations by Riley—the first use of tape delay to fragment, attenuate, and return time, looping tape through twin-tape recorders. The Gift recordings, referred to often by Soft Machine members, is the precursor to the landmark that launched the minimalist movement “In C.”  Bird of Paradise is a radical tape-manipulation work, the earliest known plundering that inspired Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain”-era phase recordings.  Mescalin Mix is a tape-loop recording from 1960-’62, partly inspired by Riley’s experience with mescalin and the work he did with Richard Maxfield. For this recording, the tape-loops extended out Riley’s window to a wine-bottle spindle in the yard; it was composed for choreographer Anna Halprin’s The Three-Legged Stool.  Concert for Two Pianos and Five Tape Recorders was recorded live at Hertz Hall on the UC Berkeley campus in 1960 with a humorous broadcast narrative by Glenn Glasow doing the play-by-play. It was performed by Riley and La Monte Young.

Riley, Terry

Les Yeux Fermés & Lifespan

Elision Fields

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 ‘70s.

Riley, Terry

Reed Streams

Elision Fields

***AVAILABLE AGAIN!!! TERRY RILEY’s first LP, originally released in 1966 in a limited edition of 1,000 on Mass Art. Includes the first appearance of the time-lag accumulator on record heard in an early version of “Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band,” along with a version of “Keyboard Studies” on reed organ, and as a bonus, a psychedelic big-band adaptation of “In C (Mantra)” recorded under the direction of WALTER BOUDREAU in 1970.

Riley, Terry

Poppy Nogood And The Phantom Band All Night Flight: Suny Buffalo, New York, 22 March 1968

Elision Fields

***AVAILABLE AGAIN!!! “The live recording of Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band All Night Flight taken from a 1968 concert titled "Purple Modal Strobe Ecstasy with the Daughters of Destruction" is the perfect trigger for what anthropologist Jean Rouch called 'The Strange Mechanism,’ the trance state which most of this decade's electronic music aspires to induce. The immediacy and the spectral filigree—the dervishes summoned during Riley's nocturnal concert—have been faithfully preserved on this CD.”—Richard Henderson, The Wire  * Available again! Riley's classic "all night" performance recorded March 22, 1968 at SUNY Buffalo, New York  * Hypnotic minimalism at its finest  * Originally issued as part of the Organ of Corti Archive Series  * Features new cover art and photography

Riley, Terry

Olson III

Elision Fields

***Written in 1963 for the Music High School students in Nacka Sweden, TERRY RILEY’s Olsen III caused an uproar at its premiere in 1967. For high school chorus and orchestra, this piece's driving pulsations are overpowering.

Riley, Terry

Atlantis Nath

Sri Moonshine Music

***A reissue of TERRY RILEY's debut release on Sri Moonshine Music—his first big studio production since the 1978 Shri Camel. A 74-minute seamless journey featuring voices, strings, synthesizer, piano, and loops from India, including the final scene of Terry's opera based on the life and works of Adolf Woelfli, "The Crucifixion of My Humble Self," as well as his "Emerald Runner," "Ascencíon," and "Remember this O Mind." Includes the same incredibly deluxe and beautiful packaging as the original issue, sans Riley’s autograph.

Riley, Terry

Book Of Abbeyozzud

New Albion

***The Book of Abbeyozzud (say "ah-BYE-ah-ZOOD," a word invented by Riley, without meaning) is a planned series of twenty-six pieces for guitar, multiple guitars and guitar in ensemble. So far, thirteen pieces are completed. Riley writes "All of the pieces have Spanish titles and take a different letter of the alphabet to begin their names. They are also indebted to great Spanish music traditions and to those traditions upon which Spanish music owes its heritage." With DAVID TANENBAUM, TRACY SILVERMAN, GYAN RILEY, and WILLIAM WINANT.

Riley, Terry

Chanting The Light Foresight

New Albion

Compositions based on the Irish epic Tain Bo Cualinge and delivered in six parts including some sections in "resonant intonation", or pure intervals. "A brain-food delicacy" - Westword, Denver.

Riley, Terry

You're Nogood

Elision Fields

Riley, Terry

Lisbon Concert

New Albion

***WAREHOUSE FIND!!! Solo piano recorded live at Festival dos Capuchos. "Riley at an inspired creative peak"—The Wire.

Riley, Terry

No Man's Land

Elision Fields

Riley, Terry

Persian Surgery Dervishes

Elision Fields