As a rock band obsessed with drones, of course AnCo would be drawn to one of its source texts: Tony Conrad, the downtown minimalist composer who rolled deeply and dreamily through the Theater of Eternal Music’s mid-’60s experiments with never-ending Möbius strip music. But unlike the meditative clusterbombs of La Monte Young’s well-tuned piano and pillow-filled Dream House, Conrad always seemed to inject an extra dose of elbow grease, sawing away maniacally at his violin as if both tone and sweat will get him closer to vibrations of the universe. Plus dude helped name the Velvet Underground, the original rock band obsessed with drones.
Geologist: Dave and I used to see him play a lot at The Cooler. In ’97 he would play behind the white sheet with a fan and you would just see the shadow. I think when it came to New York we didn’t really understand drone and minimalism so much. I think to us we were a little too young and it felt a little boring. Those were kind of the first shows where we would come out of those and be like, “You know what? A dude just really played like one or two notes on a violin for an hour but something about it was really powerful.” I think that was beginning of us sort of appreciating drone music.
Back to the Centipedia glossary
