{"id":3079,"date":"2025-06-24T10:45:47","date_gmt":"2025-06-24T10:45:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/terry-riley-by-pete-townshend-150276\/"},"modified":"2025-06-24T10:45:47","modified_gmt":"2025-06-24T10:45:47","slug":"terry-riley-by-pete-townshend-150276","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/terry-riley-by-pete-townshend-150276\/","title":{"rendered":"Terry Riley by Pete Townshend"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div class=\"post-preview\">\n<p><strong><em>Happy 90th birthday, Terry Riley! Pete Townshend hails the minimalist maestro\u2019s enduring influence<\/em><\/strong>&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"post-content google-ld-json\">\n<div class=\"editable-content\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-buttons is-layout-flex wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-button has-custom-width wp-block-button__width-100 is-style-3d\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link has-vivid-green-cyan-background-color has-background wp-element-button\" href=\"https:\/\/little.getsquirrel.co\/best-deal\/244\/13216651\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Buy A Rainbow In Curved Air here<\/strong><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"height:100px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n<p><strong><em>Happy 90th birthday, Terry Riley! Pete Townshend hails the minimalist maestro\u2019s enduring influence<\/em><\/strong>\u2026<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe first time I heard <strong>Terry Riley<\/strong> would\u2019ve been <strong>A Rainbow In Curved Air<\/strong>, when it first came out in 1969. I wasn\u2019t particularly studying minimalist or electronic music, but I was experimenting and finding new stuff, and I happened upon him. I was playing with tape machines, which were central to Terry Riley\u2019s method. It was how he got his delay loops. I also had two tape machines, but I used to bounce from machine to machine, rather than use them as a delay system.<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/shop.kelsey.co.uk\/single-issue\/uncut-magazine\/353\">THE NEW ISSUE OF UNCUT STARS BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, SLY STONE, SCOTT WALKER, NEIL YOUNG, WET LEG, BLONDIE, BOOKER T, SADE AND MUCH MORE \u2013 CLICK HERE TO HAVE IT DELIVERED<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u201c\u2018<strong>Baba O\u2019Riley<\/strong>\u2019 was an accident. It came out of the <strong>Lifehouse<\/strong> project, where I was working on creating music using computers. But I couldn\u2019t get my hands on a music computer that was up to the job, and ended up drifting into synthesisers. I was working with the Lowrey Berkshire, which had a repetitive kind of arpeggio setting. Instead of precise mathematical beats, it had drop beats in between, with drop rhythms and repeated rhythms, so you got the effect of layering. And when I listened back, I went into a kind of meditative trance. I think I\u2019d experienced some of that while listening to <strong>A Rainbow In Curved Air<\/strong> \u2013 a sense of being raised up and lifted, lost in the moment. So I just felt it was right to name it in honour of Terry Riley.<\/p>\n<div class=\"squirrel_div\" data-squirrel-id=\"13216651\" data-loaded=\"false\"><script async src=\"https:\/\/squirrels-gen.getsquirrel.co\/scripts\/01b9822bc6df10cc54883d3ee4415d0c.js\"><\/script><\/div>\n<p>\u201cAfter <strong>A Rainbow In Curved Air<\/strong>, I think everybody was hoping that he would do more, but he didn\u2019t do anything like it. I think the closest he came was working with <strong>John Cale<\/strong> on <strong>Church Of Anthrax<\/strong> [1971]. I met him later on \u2013 it might\u2019ve been the late \u201970s\/early \u201980s \u2013 when he came to a <strong>Who<\/strong> gig in San Francisco. Terry was an experimenter. He wasn\u2019t interested in [making] friends, he wasn\u2019t interested in having hits \u2013 although he did say to me when we met, \u2018I wish I\u2019d made something out of my work as you have.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think what a lot of people don\u2019t know about Terry Riley is that he\u2019s also a reed player. He plays saxophone on <strong>In C<\/strong> and did an album called <strong>Reed Streams<\/strong> [1966], which is really interesting because it demonstrates that he was drifting into more classical Indian modality scales. He also worked with the <strong>Kronos Quartet<\/strong> [1984\u2019s <strong>Cadenza On The Night Plain<\/strong> and 1989\u2019s <strong>Salome Dances For Peace<\/strong>] and that actually sounds like baroque music. So when you hear his diversions \u2013 his experiments, his adventures in tonal fields other than electronic music or organ music \u2013 you hear his baroque and Indian influences more clearly. But they\u2019re actually there in everything that he does. He\u2019s quite clearly an ascetic, he\u2019s quite clearly an inheritor of the sincere San Francisco hippie movement of spirituality and Indian and Vedantic meditation and Buddhism and so on. \u201cTo be honest, I don\u2019t know quite what I\u2019m doing yet for the Barbican performance. I know that they\u2019re doing <strong>In C<\/strong>, which I\u2019ve performed myself when I did <strong>Lifehouse Chronicles<\/strong> at Sadler\u2019s Wells in 2000. I also did an orchestral version of \u2018<strong>Baba O\u2019Riley<\/strong>\u2019, which I might like to put up if I can gather the musicians. But I\u2019m now in the process of getting out my old organs and tape loop systems and seeing if I can come up with something. It should be interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.stuff.tv\/about-us\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Here\u2019s how it works<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n<div class=\"squirrel_div\" data-squirrel-id=\"13216651\" data-loaded=\"false\"><script async src=\"https:\/\/squirrels-gen.getsquirrel.co\/scripts\/01b9822bc6df10cc54883d3ee4415d0c.js\"><\/script><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>The post <a href=\"https:\/\/www.uncut.co.uk\/features\/terry-riley-by-pete-townshend-150276\/\">Terry Riley by Pete Townshend<\/a> appeared first on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.uncut.co.uk\/\">UNCUT<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Happy 90th birthday, Terry Riley! Pete Townshend hails the minimalist maestro\u2019s enduring influence&#8230; Buy A Rainbow In Curved Air here Happy 90th birthday, Terry Riley! Pete Townshend hails the minimalist&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,35,79,1953],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features","category-interviews","category-pete-townshend","category-terry-riley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3079\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}