condition (record/cover): NM / NM
The last of Riley's four Columbia LPs, eleven years after A Rainbow in Curved Air. By 1980 Riley had spent a decade as Pandit Pran Nath's student and was teaching North Indian classical music at Mills College. Shri Camel is the most thoroughly Indian-influenced of his solo records, performed on a custom Yamaha YC-45D combo organ tuned in just intonation by Chet Wood and modified for EMT digital delay processing.
Four sections (Anthem of the Trinity, Celestial Valley, Across the Lake of the Ancient Word, Desert of Ice) recorded September 1979 at Columbia 30th Street Studio in San Francisco. Riley produced himself this time, with Hugh Gardner writing the original liner notes. The piece works as a single continuous improvised raga-like structure, with the just-intonation tuning giving the organ a beating-tone richness no equal-tempered keyboard can match. The 2025 Sony Classical Terry Riley: The Columbia Recordings box collects this with the previous three Riley CBS LPs.
