'Philosopher' and year zero of minimalism violinist, Henry Flynt, is a fine example of someone who had too much to think. Even in his quest to return to the roots of american music he thought about it too much rather than just 'doing it' like those documented on "Harry Smiths Anthology Of American Folk".
Yes, this is the man who came up with the concept of "Concept Art", which as a person who has spent most of his life in 'Conceptual Rock Bands', i'm a big fan of. He also came up with “cognitive nihilism”, which I also like the sound of.
As with the New Blockaders in the 1980's, he inhabited that awkward area of 'Anti-Art',which is very difficult to justify when you are actually still creating something?But maybe its about the way one creates things that counts....I rather think so.
He was prominent in the 1963 campaign against the cultural institutions and the art world. Already in the periphery of extreme marxist politics, he got his idea of a public campaign from them. He picketed two museums and Lincoln Center with Tony Conrad and Jack Smith.Flynt began to give lectures assailing art to avant-garde artists, Art was to be replaced with “general acognitive culture,” By which point, Flynt had convinced himself that he did not need his own “acognitive compositions,” and he destroyed most of them;In hindsight, he considers this a mistake....so....incidently do we.Silly boy.
So sadly very little exists of Flynt's Drone Violin epics,but we do have a couple of pieces from 1980/81 that escaped Henry's puritanical over-thinking.
He's also yet another lost member of the Velvet Underground,for whom he played about four gigs in 1966,filling in for Cale.
He spent most of the recording time he didn't destroy,from 1963, in his quest for american ethnic music, like early rock'n'roll,or primitive country and western stompers,with his band ,The Insurrections.Pure music, I guess, which is not too disimilar from musical eugenics,or racial purity.
If Flynt had his way in any cultural utopia of his choosing, music would resemble just a few notches above that allowed in Cambodia under Pol Pot, force fed bluegrass and hillbilly music until we were throttled to death by our own ears.
The ultimate minimalism is ,of course, SILENCE!
Tracklist:
A You Are My Everlovin (44:12)
B Celestial Power (44:24)
There's snow blindness like sun blindness.
Three more Tony Conrad recordings of John Cale's new york Drone experiments.This stuff was genuinely decades ahead of its time, and the best thing that Cale was ever involved in,unless he was on that Portsmouth Symphonia Record.....the sad thing is, i could easily check,but really whats the point in finding anything out anymore when there's no need to remember it because if I need to know it I can just go on the internet and it will remember it for me.The real danger is trusting technology to remember the facts as they truly were,and not how persons,or machines, unknown want them to be remembered.
Isn't there a Philip K. Dick story on this subject?.....no, don't look that up either.Use your own memory banks.This is whats killing debate in Pubs,as we sit gazing into our beer in relative silence.
Well, i'm gonna go out on a limb and state that Cale was indeed part of Gavin Bryers Portsmouth Symphonia project,so if anyone wants to argue that he wasn't go ahead,but without fucking googling it!
It doesn't matter if he was or if he wasn't,but at least we tried?
"We can remember it for you"!?
Tracklist:
1 Sun Blindness Music
Organ [Vox Continental] – John Cale 42:42
2 Summer Heat
Guitar – John Cale 11:06
3 The Second Fortress
Sounds [Electronic Sounds] – John Cale 10:36
OK,so now the challenge is to try and post something that's the polar opposite to Soviet Bloc Prog?
How about some middle class american avant-garde minimalism,with a splash of ethnological forgery?
American percussionist, composer, poet, occultist and calligrapher (it says here!),Angus MacLise;otherwise known as the first drummer for the Velvet Underground,fits the bill nicely.
He appeared to not be bothered that his music was basically ignored outside of that Warholian clique,and seemed to play only for his own benefit,and that of the like-minded individuals that he hung out with.MacLise was a member of La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, with Tony Conrad and John Cale, who described MacLise as "living on the Angus calendar", showing up to performances hours or even days after the band had finished.Mainly because he was drugged out of his 'avant-garde' brane!
During an Exploding Plastic Inevitable performance in 1966, MacLise showed up half an hour late and carried on drumming for half an hour after the set had finished to compensate for his late arrival;or rather thats what he said.the real money is on the possiblity that he was so stoned he didn't know the performance had finished.
Another doomed Aliester Crowley obsessive,his music has a tribal feel to it,abeit a tribe fucked up on peyote induced spirituality.
No official albums existed during his lifetime,and I doubt he even cared.Ambition is,after-all, the rocky cycle path to a creative cliff edge.This is a very posthumous 3-cassette compilation of unheard music from MacLise’s vast and wide-ranging reel-to-reel back catalogue. These recordings, produced between the mid-'60s and the late-'70s, consist of tribal trance workouts, spoken word, poetry, Brion Gysin-like tape cut-ups,minimalist droning and wacked out electronics—all animated by the remarkable spirits of MacLise and his beatniky cohorts.
He ,somehow, managed to die of malnutrition in Kathmandu in 1979!? Now that's certainly one of the more original Rock'n'Roll deaths.None of your cliched 'Choked on Vomit' nonsense when it came to Angus MacLise;it may not have been someone elses vomit,
but it was definitely his own malnutrition,and,unfortunately, his own fault.
Tracklist:
Tape I
A SR8041
B1 DS8067
B2 SR8041
Tape II
A1 Trance
A2 SR8041-B
A3 DS8043
A4 Summer 1978
A5 DS8093
B1 DS8068-B
B2 TC8028
Tape III
A TC8017
B DS8045
