Tony Conrad

American avant-garde artist, filmmaker, composer Tony Conrad’s first and only musical release for many years, Outside the Dream Syndicate is one of the great recordings of American minimalism bringing together drone with German krautrock and motorik rhythms. The story goes that Conrad asked Faust to “play an unerringly repetitive drum beat and bass line, while his violin droned frequencies honed within the Theater of Eternal Music,” a.k.a. the Dream Syndicate,  a group made up of Conrad, John Cale, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela and Angus MacLise. The goal of the sessions was to “attain a more integral correlation of pitch and rhythm, coordinating the violin’s difference tones with the rhythm established by the bass and drum.” While Conrad felt the recordings never reached that goal, the album is nonetheless a classic.

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