A founder of drone minimalism who carried it out of the loft and into rock: the violinist of the Theatre of Eternal Music, the maker of Four Violins and, with Faust, of Outside the Dream Syndicate.
Tony Conrad is the American composer, violinist and film-maker the Bureau files at Tier I as a founder of drone minimalism and the clearest single bridge between the avant-garde and the rock underground. Born in 1940 in Concord, New Hampshire, he read mathematics at Harvard and worked briefly as a programmer before moving to New York, where he fell in with the circle that would remake what sustained sound could do.
From 1962 to 1965 he played violin in La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, the drone collective that also held Marian Zazeela, John Cale and Angus MacLise. The group held just-intonation tones for vast durations, and out of that practice Conrad drew his own first statement: Four Violins (1964), four overdubbed parts ground into rough layered drones, among the earliest pure-drone recordings anyone made. He would spend the next fifty years tracing a line back to it.
His best-known work came out of an unlikely meeting. In 1972 he recorded with the Krautrock group Faust, and the resulting Outside the Dream Syndicate (1973) set his scraping violin drones over Faust's relentless, metronomic pulse. It was his only commercial release for many years, and it is now widely held to be the vital link between early minimalism and the rock avant-garde, a record claimed at once by the minimalists and the Krautrock canon. Its drone-over-pulse template echoes through everything from Sunn O))) to the drone tradition this archive files.
Conrad was an equally radical film-maker. The Flicker (1966) is built from patterns of black and clear frames timed to act directly on the viewer's eye and brain, and the Yellow Movies reduced cinema to paint slowly ageing across decades. The same impulse runs through both the sound and the film: take a medium down to its physical base and hold it there until it does something to the body.
He was also a theorist of tuning, tracing his ear for timbre-and-tuning order back to the 17th-century violinist Heinrich Biber, and in 1997 the 4-CD Early Minimalism reenacted and extended the Theatre's lost music. That project was bound up with a long and bitter dispute: Conrad insisted the Theatre had been a democratic collective rather than Young's vehicle, and the 2000 release of the bootlegged Day of Niagara without Young's consent brought lawsuits and a public battle over who, if anyone, owned the drone.
The Bureau files Tony Conrad at Artists · Tier I as a founder of the drone, a film-maker of equal nerve, and the figure through whom minimalism reached the rock avant-garde. He died in 2016.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the postwar · last revised c. the Anthropocene