Tony Conrad

On the night of October 12, 2002 the Mudam in Luxembourg, I. M. Pei's Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, was still a construction site, four years from opening. For the city's Museum Night, at the invitation of director Marie-Claude Beaud, Tony Conrad set up inside the unfinished building with a large sheet hung between himself and the audience. He played for just under an hour. Nobody on the other side of the sheet was told what he was doing, and he never explained afterwards. This CD is the recording of that evening, published by Sub Rosa for the first time.

What can be heard are the two instruments he was working with most in those years. One is the amplified violin he had played since the early 1960s, when he sat alongside La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela and John Cale in the Theatre of Eternal Music. The other is the Long String Instrument he built himself, a frame of long strings that he bowed and struck to bring out the overtones sitting inside a single fundamental. The concrete shell around him is part of the recording too; the sound fills it and comes back changed. The concert was co-organised by Transhistorics, a joint project between Sub Rosa and Philippe Franck's Transcultures, and it opened a period of European activity for Conrad that included several concerts with Charlemagne Palestine, among them An Aural Symbiotic Mystery in 2005.

The eight page booklet contains a long interview with Conrad by Philippe Franck, published here as a tribute to him. Conrad talks about working at what he calls the zero degree of sound, harmonic structure itself, and says that a single open fifth already holds dance, meditation and heroism if he can find his way into it. He remembers a student of La Monte Young telling him he was playing out of tune, and his reply: I am playing music, not notes. The hour on this disc is a good illustration of what he meant. Digipack with 8 page booklet.