Landscape With Terry Riley.

Get comfortable and enjoy a 106 minute Terry Riley documentary filmed in the late '80ies on Riley's farm. Footage includes goat milking, a lengthy interview and a musical performance of "Shri Camel: Morning Corona" shot in the framework of a cabin under construction. Watch the movie or stream audio of the interview or the music HERE.

Grab A Pillow And Get Minimal With Terry Riley.

Photos from Terry Riley's “Pipe Dreams" solo grand piano performance at Berkeley Art Museum November 6th 2009. Photos by Mike Doyle.

Terry Riley Plays "Hurricane Mama Blues" At Walt Disney Concert Hall!

An excellent LA Times review of Terry Riley's performance at the Disney Concert Hall.

MUSIC REVIEW
Terry Riley at Walt Disney Concert Hall
The organist rides 'Hurricane Mama' into cosmic depths.
By Mark Swed, Times Music Critic
May 27, 2008

AT 4:53 p.m. Sunday, NASA's Phoenix spacecraft landed on Mars, and two hours later pictures from the dusty red planet arrived at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to prove it.

But sound doesn't travel as fast as light, so it took a half-hour longer before we had an indication of extraterrestrial life stirring. That is when Hurricane Mama awakened and began to make miraculous music a few miles from JPL at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Terry Riley -- a Space Age Prospero dressed in black, wearing a black skull cap and in striped stocking feet, his long gray beard flowing -- walked to the organ consol. The hall was darkened. The wooden pipes were illuminated deep purple. No longer "French fries," a nickname Riley told the audience he felt inelegant, the pipes were newly dubbed "radiant columns of Orfeo." Hurricane Mama is his name for the Disney organ.

For the next two hours, Hurricane Mama howled and roared. Orfeo's columns traced the shapes of swirling galaxies and accompanied accelerating quanta as they collided releasing astonishing quantities of energy. They strung out strings of space-time and hymned drones of mystical oneness with the universe. All of that came before lift-off, which occurred in a long-held ground-shaking, gravity-defying final chord.

Riley and the organ are a match made on the other side of Mars, namely heaven. As the composer who launched Minimalism in 1964 with "In C," he was an obviously crucial figure in the Los Angeles Philharmonic's "Minimalist Jukebox" festival two years ago. At that time, the orchestra invited Riley to create a new work for the organ. "Universal Bridge," which began with an Anthem for Disney Hall and concluded with nature unleashed in "Hurricane Mama Blues," was the result.

"Minimalist" is a strange tag for Riley. It suits him in that he has never lost his love for interlocking repetitive figures imbued with the strength to send the brain into psychedelic reverie. But Riley is really a musical accumulator.

Years of study in India have made him a master of raga, played on the keyboard and sung. A virtuosic pianist and inspired improviser, he began as a jazz player and, at 72, remains a brilliant jazz player. Hardly remaining in or anywhere near C, he roams through modes and microtones continually enriching his harmonic palate. Melodically and rhythmically he flows naturally between East and West, ancient times, recent music history and the present.

Although he has performed before on the pipe organ, Riley's main instruments are piano, electric organ and synthesizer. To prepare for Sunday's concert, he made several trips from his home in Northern California to spend nights familiarizing himself with the Disney organ, typically practicing from midnight to 6 a.m., a period when he could play in the dark uninterrupted with only the night watchman looking on. His original idea was to give an all-night concert, from around 11 to dawn, but he had to scrap that when the Philharmonic put him on its regular organ series.

For the first half of his program, Riley revised two classic pieces, first updating "Persian Surgery Dervishes," a study in whirling repetitions for electric keyboard and tape delay. (A famous performance of that was given and recorded in Los Angeles in 1971). Sunday's new "A Persian Surgery Dervish in the Nursery" made his performance on the old electronic technology seem downright primitive. On Disney's instrument, Riley achieved a sense of awe-inspiring vastness with thick church-like diapason textures. For an arrangement of a few themes from his epic 1985 string quartet, "Salome Dances for Peace," Riley began with spellbinding rumbling of low notes and then traced trilling fanciful melodies, at one point adding raga-like vocalization.

The "Universal Bridge" premiere was after intermission. Its opening Anthem for Disney Hall proved an embracing celebration of succulent chords in grand progression. The second movement, "The Bull," began with Middle Eastern melodic figuration over an arpeggiated ostinato base that had a faintly tango feel and slowly evolved into Bachian exuberance.

In the next movement, "The Shape of Flames," calm, soft-grained Mexican-like figures radiated into musical styles from near and far, with occasional long dissonant blasts, as it built into the rapturous, overpowering, indescribable "Hurricane Mama Blues."

On a personal note, I am not a disinterested observer of Riley's music. I have been attending his concerts since the '60s. I lined up with other students waiting for a Berkeley record store to open to buy "In C" the day the first recording of it was released. I attended Mills College in Oakland when Riley taught there in the '70s (although I didn't study with him). I got goose bumps watching him receive an honorary doctorate at CalArts this month.

My expectations for Sunday's concert were impossibly high. They were exceeded.

Shjips Feature On Drown In Sound.com

DiScover: Wooden Shjips
By Him Tall
Artists: Wooden Shjips
Online feature

San Francisco will probably always struggle to shrug off the 40-year-old 'Summer of Love' weight of history that hangs over one the most beautiful and chilled of US cities. We've had punk, Bay Area thrash metal and hardcore since, but the love and peace era personified by the Haight-Ashbury hippie revolution and the Golden Gate Park 'Be-Ins' of 1967 continue to fascinate.

Recently a handful of bands loosely based in and around the city have taken the free experimental spirit of '60s bands such as the United States of America, the Velvet Underground, Silver Apples, and the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band and filtered their sound through the motorik shuffle of krautrock and the discordance of obscure minimalist composers. I spoke to Wooden Shjips guitarist/vocalist and founder member Ripley Johnson via the magic of e-mail and asked him to explain a few things about their retro-futurist sound.

When I listened to the recent Wooden Shjips track on last month’s Mojo cover-mounted CD I got the track listing mixed up and initially thought I was listening to the early Soft Machine demos when in fact it was your track! Anyway, it piqued my interest being one of only two contemporary tracks on the CD. Is it possible to explain how the band came to be and how its original improvisational style mutated into the band’s sound today?

“Ha ha! I don’t really know much about Soft Machine either, though I’ve read good things. The original plan was to integrate elements of different genres of music: the minimalist movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, especially the music of Angus MacLise, Terry Riley and John Cale; primitive rock, a la the Velvet Underground, Link Wray, the Seeds; and the improvisation of jazz and psychedelic rock. Originally we just jammed together and felt our way forward. No real songs. We did that for about nine months before playing our first show.”

From an admittedly unseasonably warm autumnal London it's easy to romanticise a San Francisco/West Coast scene in which you're swapping riffs with Howling Rain, Earthless and Assembled Head in Sunburst Sound. Is there any reality to this at all?

“Ha! Unfortunately, no. We opened a Roky Erickson show with Howlin’ Rain earlier in the year, and we have a show with Earthless coming up. That’s about the extent of it so far.”

Whilst referencing some classic ‘60s and ‘70s psych/kraut and experimental bands, your music (to me anyway) seems equally informed by a more ‘80s aesthetic of taking these influences and spinning them (I’m thinking Loop, Spacemen 3, Scientists etc here). Does my shoddy theory have any relevance? I'm not saying you're stuck in the ‘80s!

“Actually, no. We’ve gotten those comparisons before. Obviously, we need to go record shopping. I really like Loop, but it’s a relatively new discovery. I don’t think the other guys have heard any of those bands. I suspect that they were influenced by the same music as us: Velvet Underground, Stooges, 13th Floor Elevators, etc. I think it’s just natural for bands to want to beat a riff into the ground over and over. It’s always been that way. Whether krautrock, or the electric Miles Davis bands, or ? and the Mysterians.”

In this age of blogs and MySpace sites I was, after hearing your track on the Mojo cover mount, able to track down a lot of info about you very quickly. Do you think this loss of any intended or accidental mystique is a good or bad thing?

“It’s just different. I grew up deciphering album covers for little clues about a band, and referencing the Harmony Encyclopaedia of Rock for discographies. Hunting for records used to be more of a sport. If someone really wanted to remain a mystery today, I think they could. It would take a profound commitment. The flipside is that you can be relatively obscure and have a substantial audience. That’s good for everyone.”

You've released some hard to find, over here anyway, singles: is the plan to keep releasing odd singles with various labels?

“Absolutely. How we’ll release them, I don’t know. In some ways it’s easier to do it ourselves because we can keep the overhead low and the turnaround quick. We just co-released one with Holy Mountain to benefit Food Not Bombs. The first pressing proceeds will go to them, the second pressing will go towards our rent. We like that model and are thinking of doing a holiday record in a similar way.”

Could you describe the Wooden Shjips live experience and are there any plans to bring the Wooden Shjips over to Europe/UK to play in the foreseeable future?

“From my perspective on stage, I would describe it as loud and loose. We would love to come to the UK. We’re hoping sometime next year!”

Let’s hope they do! Wooden Shjips’ debut album is released on the mighty Holy Mountain label and is in the shops now.

Words: Him Tall

Revolver USA Podcast #3 Is Ready For Your Listening.

On the third installment of the Revolver USA Podcast you can hear up and coming tracks from such righteous artist as; Robert Pollard, Melt Banana, White/Lichens, Terry Riley, Thee More Shallows, Loden, Chris Connelly, DJ Elephant Power, Qua, and the Zodiacs.

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Our podcasts will appear on a weekly basis featuring the latest distributed by Revolver USA. They are enhanced podcats featuring album artwork and links to various sites.