John Cale / Tony Conrad / Angus Maclise / La Monte Young / Marian Zazeela - Inside The Dream Syndicate Volume I: Day of Niagara (1965)

rocky saith:

let's take it

all the way out there

for a minute (or thirty)...

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boomkat saith: Listening to 'Inside the Dream Syndicate Volume I: Day of Niagara' you're likely to be struck with one unassailable thought; how on earth can this be 45 years old?!

A single extended piece, 'Inside the Dream Syndicate...' is retrospectively credited as being one of the most important recordings to emerge from the mid-1960's, a product of the extraordinary sonic force conjured into being by John Cale, Tony Conrad, Angus Maclise, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela.

Essentially one fluctuating drone

which is both softened and serrated

by Cale and Conrad's conflicting violin styles.

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amg saith: Since its initial release, controversy has swirled around this album.

In the early '60s, John Cale, Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Angus Maclise, and Marian Zazeela were all a part of New York's underground music and emergent minimalist scenes. In a variety of formations, usually involving Cale, Conrad, and Young, they played together billed alternately as the Theater of Eternal Music or as the Dream Syndicate.

Together they were articulating what were to become the central tenets of American minimalism. They disbanded around 1965, and since then all involved have staked, depending on the day and weather, various claims to the group's musical and philosophical ideas and -- more importantly in this case -- unreleased recordings.

This album, a remastered copy of a tape from one of the Dream Syndicate's sessions recorded in Young's Church Street apartment, was released without anyone's expressed written consent and occasioned a ten-page statement from Young and his lawyer contesting the label's legal authority to put out this "unauthorized bootleg."

The record makes these issues of intellectual property all the more critical, as the few obscure albums from the Dream Syndicate are long out of print and notoriously difficult to find.

For anyone who cares about the history of American music, however, the album is an exceptional piece of musical history. All of the early precepts of minimalism are present -- incremental variation, drone, sustained pitch -- as well as the emphasis on group creation through improvisation. Unfortunately, the mix is not overwhelming in quality, and the effects of the interplay among instruments is lessened.

Nonetheless, the album is sonically beatific, formally profound, and an incomparable look inside the Syndicate. Table of the Elements should be praised for letting the chips fall where they may in the interest of a more complete understanding of music history, especially since history is still too near to clearly substantiate anyone's claims.

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Tony Conrad with Faust - Outside The Dream Syndicate

At first a small and hypnotic record that quietly becomes possessive and a monster. Let it lean into you. Give it some time. Put it on. Get in your hammock and let the screws work their way in.

___________________

AMG: Recorded over a span of three days in 1973, Outside the Dream Syndicate was Tony Conrad's first official release; though also credited to the celebrated Kraut rock band Faust, it's primarily a showcase for Conrad's minimalist drone explorations, an aesthetic fascinatingly at odds with the noisy, fragmented sound of his collaborators. Consisting of three epic tracks, each topping out in excess of 20 minutes, the album is hypnotically contemplative; the music shifts in subtle -- almost subliminal -- fashion, and the deeper one listens, the more rewarding it becomes.


Dusted: Anybody who’s reveled in the hypno-purr, clang and swoosh that typified the 1972 effort might feel, as I did, that as great as that album was, a certain push over the edge was lacking. All of the necessary components were there – Jean Herve Peron’s rippingly metallic bass, Zappi Deiarmeir’s stoically thunderous drums, Conrad’s shrill and ever-changing “eternal music” violin ruminations, all augmented by keyboard atmospheres courtesy of the late Rudolf Sosna. It all sounds just a shade too perfect now, too contrived, with every element audible without achieving the necessary blend. As a recent album title has it, “It’s magnificent, but it isn’t war.” Conrad’s Early Minimalism project came much closer to how I imagined the 1972 material to sound in Wumme – stark, full, distortion breeding difference tones which breeded three-dimensionality.


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