»Our image of the past is the ›true‹ past,« Tony Conrad once said. This is the same Tony Conrad who in the 1960s was one of the foremost pioneers of Minimal Music and structural film and who has recently come into the spotlight again, this time focusing on a wider-ranging music practice. Working on our image of the past may be just as pivotal here as deliberately operating with aspects of the irrecoverable, of the reconstructible and of duration, all of which form important links between then and now, without however nourishing the illusion of continuity or linearity. »The Theatre of Eternal Music« was the title chosen by La Monte Young for the music ensemble he founded in 1962, which set out to explore the texture and effect of sustained notes – a kind of collective abolishment of the boundaries of time and perception, in which Conrad (as well as John Cale) played significant roles. »The Dream Syndicate« was Conrad’s (and Cale’s) preferred description, designed in particular to counter the idea of transcendental timelessness, replacing it instead with the aspect of shared sound creation. Even today, an irreconcilable battle still smolders between Conrad and Young with regard to the musical (and authorship) concept underlying their work. This has led to the fact that the hour-long sessions and performances of »Dream Music« still have yet to be heard, with one controversial exception in the year 1965.
That the image of the past is nevertheless encumbered with a high degree of complexity – indeed, that it invariably carries this complexity within it – is a subject that Branden W. Joseph pursues in his richly detailed study »Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage.« Joseph’s »minor history,« which – microhistory or not – does manage to connect the greats of that era, concentrates only on Conrad’s work during the 1960s. But this restriction turns out to be an advantage, not only in view of the amount of material that had to be dealt with, but also because it allows the author to demonstrate in detail how Minimal Music emerged from John Cage’s »aesthetic of immanence« and then ultimately moved far away from those origins.
Just as impressive is Joseph’s in-depth discussion of what is probably Conrad’s most famous film, »The Flicker« (1966), which here undergoes a virtually unsurpassable contextualization, bringing in aspects of perceptual physiology, Burroughs’ and Gysin’s efforts at deconditioning and the theories on structural film that were just then gaining currency. An aspect of Conrad’s work that is perhaps less well-known (and is evidenced in his later video works) is illuminated in a chapter on his affinity and collaboration with the camp film director Jack Smith. By contrast, Conrad’s role in the founding of The Velvet Underground, likewise discussed here, belongs more to the marginalia of Rock history, comprising nothing more than a single demo tape.
More fruitful by far is Conrad’s relationship with the artist, musician and initiator of »Concept Art« Henry Flynt, which brought to light important aspects of the breaking down of boundaries, in particular as regards the overcoming of so-called »Serious Culture.« Flynt and Conrad for example organized a public protest against Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1964, whose avant-gardism was in their opinion too Eurocentric, even smacking of imperialistic elitism (a topic that Cornelius Cardew would take up years later on a more theoretical basis).
But the most informative and multifaceted aspect of Joseph’s analysis is the genealogical derivation of Conrad’s concept of »heterophony« – the notion of the impossibility of harmonizing the interplay of irreducible voices, which nonetheless could be related in an extended sense of harmony. According to Joseph’s painstaking research, this idea, which still dominates Conrad’s music today – for instance his work »Slapping Pythagoras« (1995) or »An Aural Symbiotic Mystery,« recorded in 2005 with Charlemagne Palestine – can be traced back to several vectors: to the trend toward a »social watershed« that began to surface in the Fluxus-inflected, performance-centered music-making of the early 1960s; to the gradual changeover from a »regime of composing« to a »regime of listening,« which found expression in the collective ensemble practice of the Dream Syndicate, reacting sensitively to the most minimal of shifts; to the overcoming of transcendental forms like the ones that were simultaneously being strived for in early Minimal Art, for example by Robert Morris; and finally to the exploration of the fundamentally ambivalent relationship between harmony and rhythm – something that Conrad’s »Flicker« film sounded out thoroughly on the visual plane.
These and other factors, in their complex interplay and in some cases their strange and contradictory overlaps, generate an image of the past that could not be more relevant to Conrad’s current music. (According to Conrad’s own account, he let his efforts to create a »formalistic film« culminate in a kind of end-game in 1975.) The fact that the sustained micro-intervals and heterophonies still produce the same psychotropic effect today as they did back then is demonstrated by Conrad’s intensity-saturated music performances. Whether in these themselves a kind of all-encompassing duration becomes virulent – between the 1960s and today, but also between mediums as diverse as film, video, music and performance – in the meantime has to with an image construction that itself constantly carries new facets into present-day practice. A practice that in its vehemence and its formidable sound concept is hard to top.
Branden W. Joseph’s book »Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (A ›Minor‹ History)« was published in 2008 by Zone Books, New York. The »Wien modern« festival, in conjunction with sixpackfilm, the Austrian Film Museum and brut Wien, put on the series »Tony Conrad DreaMinimalist« from 26 to 31 October 2008 (http://www.wienmodern.at). Tony Conrad can be found online at http://tonyconrad.net.
Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida
