La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela are absolute titans of the 20th century avant-garde, having broken considerable ground at the intersection of Minimalism and Drone Music during their 1960s heyday. However, the duo’s early work has been persistently difficult to hear. For example, Superior Viaduct’s release of 31 VII 69 10:26 – 10:49 PM / 23 VIII 64 2:50:45 – 3:11 AM The Volga Delta a.k.a. The Black Record is the first (legit) reissue of this legendary album since it first came out in 1969. Featuring two wildly differing side-long pieces, it is a masterwork of highly disciplined drone logic and experimental abstraction, available March 31 on clear vinyl (with a poster), black vinyl (sans poster) and compact disc.
Partners in art and life, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela came to prominence (of a decidedly subterranean fashion) in New York City during the waning days of the classic Bohemian era, and that they both still walk among us is a reality to cherish. Young is the more well-known of the two, as Zazeela, a multimedia artist on her own, notably, has contributed to a small number of his recordings as a musician. But as photographer, album designer, performance lighter and producer in general, her impact is felt throughout his discography, as difficult as that body of work has been to hear.
The LP under review here, which for space considerations will be called The Black Record, was already half an archival release upon issue in 1969. Side two, “23 VIII 64 2:50:45 – 3:11 AM The Volga Delta,” was captured in the New York City studio of Young and Zazeela in 1964 (per the title), the recording a part of a longer composition, Studies in the Bowed Disc; for the piece, a gong is bowed (the instrument a gift to Young and Zazeela from sculptor Robert Morris), with the sound nearer to noise music than to the sustained resonances one might expect to result from a bowed gong.
More typically dronelike prolonged tones are heard via side one’s “31 VII 69 10:26 – 10:49 PM,” which was recorded in Munich in 1969 at the gallery belonging to arts impresario Heiner Friedrich. Released on vinyl by Friedrich on his Edition X imprint that very year, “31 VII 69 10:26 – 10:49 PM” is also part of a another longer composition, Map of 49’s Dream the Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery; this segment features the voices of Young and Zazeela against a sine wave drone, with the stated influence of Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath easy to absorb.
The original LP, which appears to be the only record issued by Friedrich, at least via Edition X, was either a 2,000-copy or a 2,800-copy run (reports differ), with 98 of them signed and dated by the artists. Side one is to be played at 33 & 1/3 RPM, while side two can be played at 33 & 1/3 (an accurate representation of the gong performance), but also 16 & 2/3 RPM, and if you one can find a way, 8 & 1/3 RPM, with these do-it-yourself variations deepening Young and Zazeela’s affiliation with the conventions-flouting anti-elitist Fluxus art movement that thrived across the 1960s.
The Black Record has been bootlegged on LP and CD a handful of times over the decades (but interestingly, nobody’s taken the initiative to add bonus cuts of side two at 16 & 2/3 and 8 & 1/3 RPM). Those editions surely made folks fortunate enough to discover them quite happy, but ultimately the bootlegs did very little to dent this recording’s overall scarcity.
To be clear, starting in the late 1980s, releases credited to La Monte Young (nearly always with artistic and design input from Zazeela) did become more widely available, starting in 1987 with The Well-Tuned Piano 81 X 25 6:17:50 – 11:18:59 PM NYC, a 5CD set, on Gramavision, that label also issuing The Second Dream of the High Tension Line Stepdown Transformer From the Four Dreams of China (1962), a single CD, in ’91, and Just Stompin’ (Live at the Kitchen), a 2CD collab with the Forever Bad Blues Band, in ’93.
The Tamburas Of Pandit Pran Nath, co-credited with Zazeela, came out on CD in 1999 on the Just Dreams label, but it was Inside The Dream Syndicate Volume I: Day Of Niagara (1965), issued in 2000 and credited to John Cale, Tony Conrad, Angus Maclise, Young and Zazeela, that made a sizeable splash, and unsurprisingly so, given its connection to The Velvet Underground. Essentially another bootleg (if one with a higher than usual profile), its emergence was not well received by Young, who complained of the recording quality and the lack of design input from Zazeela.
This discographical background hopefully imparts how Young and Zazeela have diligently kept tabs on the release of their music (bootlegs aside) on their terms (frequently to the consternation of collaborators, Cale and Conrad in particular), an attitude that extends to the uncompromising nature of the musical works. By extension, Young’s importance to Minimalism sometimes gets downplayed or overlooked completely, but his (and Zazeela’s) crucial role in the development of the 1960s underground shouldn’t be underestimated.
Side one of The Black Record remains the more striking of the two, partly for the boldness of its dive into the drone aesthetic, and in particular for how Young and Zazeela take inspiration from Indian music (Ali Akbar Khan and Chatur Lal as well as Pandit Pran Nath, with whom Young studied). It’s quite necessary to keep in mind how Young’s innovations (in short, establishing Drone Music in the West) were built upon musical precedent from the East.
Side one gains additional weight for how the sine wave drone is mingled with the rising and falling raw throatiness of Young and Zazeela. Bluntly, if droning musically has become fairly common by this late date, vocal drones aren’t so frequently, at least in Western music. And so, half a century later, the sonic combination heard in “31 VII 69 10:26 – 10:49 PM” has lost none of its freshness.
Side two is a less gripping affair but is still quite interesting in its proximity to noise music, though as the 20 minutes unwind the piece is less abrasive than the association to noise music might suggest. Although the bowing of the gong (or possibly two, as it is occasionally written that “23 VIII 64 2:50:45 – 3:11 AM The Volga Delta” is a bowed gong duet) is clearly heard, there is also no shortage of clanging metal.
Indeed, at times, it’s a bit like the sound of a steel cauldron being battered with a metal rod. Hopefully by now, the reader will know if that’ll be music to their ears. If perhaps not the resonances one immediately associates with the names La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, side two deepens both The Black Record’s essentiality and its makers’ sizable legacy.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
