Music Arcades: Terry Riley: Descending Moonshine Dervishes

Ah, this is pretty hardcore. In a good way. Just Terry and his 'prepared' electronic organ, noodling away for as long as the two sides of a vinyl record would allow (just over 50 minutes). It sounds like he could go on like this forever, and legend has it that 40 years ago that's exactly what he did.

So the record is just a snapshot of a much larger piece, like Longplayer. Except… Except that Longplayer is a much more mathematical, deterministic, designed so that it can run without human intervention (beyond that necessary to keep to running). Riley's name is forever yoked to Steve Reich's, Philip Glass's and La Monte Young's. A superficial attempt to trace where this started leads back to Michael Nyman's book on Experimental Music, first published in 1974. But let's see if we can break him out of that limiting set of associations, with Glass and Reich at least, as they are very East Coast, whereas Riley is so West Coast as to make it hard to dodge the dodgy "New Age" tag — just Google the images of him. Descending Moonshine Dervishes has much more in common with A Meeting by the River than The Desert Music. It's closer to the whimsical unravellings of Roedelius than any formal symmetries.

I got my copy in the mid-eighties, the original vinyl release on Kuckuck (Cuckoo), £5.99 from Their Price. I can't claim to have a listened to it a lot, especially recently. I wish I had. There's something not quite fulfilling about effectively coming to it new every time. I'd like to get to know every phase, every quickening and every new motif, like I know those albums I've heard 20 or 30 times.