Terry Riley
Born in Colfax, California, Riley studied at Shasta College, San Francisco State University. He was involved in the experimental San Francisco Tape Music Center working with Morton Subotnick, Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros and Ramon Sender. His most influential teacher, however, was Pandit Pran Nath (1918-1996), a master of Indian classical voice, who also taught La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela.
Born in Colfax, California, Riley studied at Shasta College, San Francisco State University. He was involved in the experimental San Francisco Tape Music Center working with Morton Subotnick, Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros and Ramon Sender. His most influential teacher, however, was Pandit Pran Nath (1918-1996), a master of Indian classical voice, who also taught La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela.
The Harp Of New Albion
The Harp of New Albion is a transfixing solo piano recording, conceived and performed by world-renowned minimalist composer, the ever-innovative Terry Riley. His inspiration for this work came from a legendary harp, left behind in the New World in 1579, on the shores of Nova Albion, which is now called San Francisco Bay. A Native American medicine man is said to have found the harp and placed it on a cliff where the westerly winds played upon it and temperature and humidity changes created an ev…
Lisbon Concert
The highly influential composer and improviser recorded live in Lisbon at the Festival Dos Capuchos, 16th July 1995. "This gorgeous set of piano improvisations reflects minimalist composer Terry Riley's lifelong study of Indian music. It is an outstanding recording which captures Terry Riley at an inspired peak. Performances of such spontaneous and beautiful music are scarce and even less-frequently performed by the composer himself at such a late stage in an extraordinary career. To soun…
Autodreamographical
Despite being midway through his seventies, minimalist icon Terry Riley shows no signs of slowing down or satisfying his searching experimental appetite. On Autodreamographical Tales Riley embarks upon a musical dream diary, a project initiated in 1996. The resultant pieces play out chiefly as spoken-word passages given musical accompaniment, with Riley scoring his own strange REM meanderings via an array of MIDI instruments and piano pieces. At various points during the course of the album you …
Olson III
A piece of unrelenting intensity, Olson III may be one of the most powerful compositions from minimalist composer Terry Riley. Based on the same phasing principals of In C, Olson III is filled with short motives that each ensemble member must play and repeat before moving onto the next. A chorus singing "To begin" joins into the droning fray of string instruments, sawing away à la In C. For 53 minutes here, Riley (on soprano saxophone) and a teenage student orchestra at the Nacka School of Music…
in C
Features three Terry Riley pieces: "In C", "In DO(M)", "In Moscow". "In April 2000 the American composer and performer on the keyboard Terry Riley performed in Moscow: one evening at Moscow Conservatory's Rachmaninoff Hall, which was the closing evening of the SKIF #4 (the Sergey Kuryokhin International Festival), and in two days at a large-scale concert at the Cultural Center 'DOM', which was the opening concert of the 13th 'Alternativa' festival of contemporary music. At the opening concert of…
Keyboard Study 2 / Initiative (+Systèmes)
A split release between Terry Riley and French avant-garde composer Pierre Marietan that was recorded in Paris on September 30th and October 1st, 1969. Riley's piece is a 24-minute work for 2 pianos (Gérard Frémy and Martine Joste of the GERM ensemble - Groupe d'Etude et Réalisation Musicale). Marieten's piece is performed by the full GERM ensemble including Philippe Blachette (violin), Philippe Drogoz (double bass), Louis Roquin (trumpet), Chantal Lemaire (cello), Gérard Frémy (piano), Martine …
Chanting the Light of Foresight
a beautiful album, Riley composed the pieces on this album for the legendary ROVA Saxophone Quartet. The work is based on the Taín Bó Cuailnge ("The Cattle Raid of Cooley"), an invasion of Ulster by the armies of Medb and Ailill. Long out of print
No Man\'s Land
this glistening, pulsating CD for No Man's Land soundtrack documents another stage in the flux of influence and invention that makes Riley's music. This album is much more closer to the 'real' minimalism, with Riley maily playing organ, but the tablas and sitar can be heard on almost every track, along with some voice and what sounds like electronically altered instruments. Few copies available, long out of print
Happy Ending
Happy Ending contains the soundtrack to Joel Santoni's Les Yeux Fermes (1972), reissued together with Lifespan (1974) as Les Yeux Fermes & Lifespan (Elision Fields, 2007). The soundtrack itself consists of two lengthy pieces: the grave Journey From A Death of a Friend for organ and piano (the highlight of the album), and the lightweight Happy Endings for piano and saxophone (reminiscent of Poppy Nogood). Only copy available.
Cadenza On The Night Plain and Other String Quartets
After years of composing for piano and electronic media and more jazz-based ensembles, David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet convinced Terry Riley to try his hand at a work for the recently formed ensemble (DH is the 1st violinist). This marked the beginning of an astonishing series of works for string quartet, that far exceed anything produced for the medium by either Steve Reich or Philip Glass (who've both composed works for Kronos). This LP shows the earliest of Riley's music for Kronos. "G…
Last Camel In Paris
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 Ya…
Keyboard studies
Minimal music and its strangely fascinating suspended sound animation has long held cult status in the musical world. On this CD Fabrizio Ottaviucci offers more new innovations with Terry Riley's 'Keyboard Studies #1' and '#2'. The keyboard studies are a few pages with short musical formulas and a long 'user's guide' requiring a lot of thought and organizational energy before things can be put into practice. The pianist soon recognized that one interpreter alone couldn't realize the tricky polyp…
Banana Humberto
Brand new Terry Riley CD, BH2K was commissioned by the Paul Dresher Ensemble and first performed on Feb. 10, 2001 at. Stanford University as part of the Lively Arts Festival and featured Terry Riley as piano soloist. The fifty-minute work is in four movements. The work takes the form of a chamber concerto and was written specifically for the performance capabilities of the Dresher Ensemble and guest soloist Tracy Silverman on Electric Viola. The first movement is the most classical in form an…
Atlantis Nath
The debut release on Terry Riley's new label, from 2002 in a deluxe packaging. "Sri Moonshine Studios is happy to announce it's first release, Atlantis Nath, recorded, mixed and edited during the period of 1993-98 in Nice France at the CIRM studios. Terry's first big studio production since the 1978 Shri Camel is a 74-minute seamless journey featuring voices, strings, synthesizer, piano and loops from India. The CD is packaged in a natural paper 6-panel foldout with radiant Asian inspired illus…
Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band All Night Flight
Possibly the best currently available recording of Terry Riley's solo saxophone/organ/time-lag accumulator improvisations (for just the organ/time-lag, make a b-line to “persian surgery dervishes”), recorded in concert in buffalo, ny in the waning days of the 1960s.A perfect prime-era challenged-fidelity recording; a better accompaniment to your daily 6:20pm post rush-hour zone-out i’ve yet to hear. overall, tonally, this is much darker & brooding than other riley, making it something of anomaly…
Les Yeux Fermés & Lifespan
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 screene…
Just Before Dawn
What we are here presenting is one of the most intimate releases Ants has produced ever. Luca Miti is a “strange” kind of composer and musician. And organizer, too. He has the uncommon attitude to make private experiences and let them become “public” in a very natural way. Primarily known for his compositions (most of them unconventional and ”experimental” in the best sense) and impro-live-written collaborations, he’s also a “perfomer” with many different sides. One of these aspetcs is shown in…