Terry Riley: In C

For many years after I first read about this an album, "the classic of minimalism" according to Paul Griffiths' Guide to Electronic Music (1979), it was simply unavailable. Deleted by CBS. Nowadays hearing it is literally one-click away. Look, click here Terry Riley – In C and off you go. Like what you hear? You can download it all for free. But, caveat delator (that's my stab at 'beware downloader' in Latin), it may say the track is 40:58 long, but when you get it into iTunes it's 76:17 long.

Anyway, later in the '80s this Edsel reissue came out. It looks like I ordered it from Record Collector in Broomhill and asked them to get it on CD if possible, because the price tag says '£6.99 S/O Not on CD'.

This is the version on which Terry Riley himself plays, along with an ensemble that includes Jon Hassell, his missus, Margaret, and Stuart Dempster (who I know best for his recordings in an enormous water cistern with Pauline Oliveros). A year or so ago, I also got the Bang on a Can version from emusic. I played both back-to-back today, and I think I prefer the latter. It swings a bit more.

But the original was clearly very much a product of its time, just as A Rainbow in Curved Air was a few years later. This version comes with sleevenotes by Paul Williams:

Playing this record for a small group of people is like watching a web being spun. Playing it for a friend means watching a Pilgrim's Progress of reactions. Playing it for yourself may be like staring at a mirror for forty-five minutes…

If I try to imagine playing it for you, I'd anticipate more of a Blair Witch Project of reactions. I was listening to the Last.fm take while dealing with an obnoxious email, and In C didn't calm me at all. Quite the reverse; at one point it was actually quite grating. So don't imagine the "trip", as Paul Williams calls it, is blissed-out and new age throughout.

Never mind the 'classic' status of this piece, while Steve Reich's and Philip Glass's early pieces have a formal austerity that feels like bottled essence of minimalism, I think Terry Riley's work didn't really find its feet until he shook off the strict discipline, stopped playing with an ensemble, and just indulged himself in solo noodlings. For almost everybody else that would be a recipe for disaster, but Riley does that mix of idiosyncrasy and mysticism very well. If Van Morrison had grown up on the West Coast instead of East Belfast, he'd have probably sounded the same.

MusicBrainz entry for this album Wikipedia entry for this album Rate Your Music entry for this album Listen to this album in full at Last.fm