Baba O’Terry

There is something unsettling about Terry Riley’s enormous disembodied, amply-foreheaded* face smiling at you slightly too benignly** from the cover of his A Rainbow In Curved Air LP. Maybe it is something to do with the way his luxuriant sideburns tickle the trees and hedges he has been superimposed on, or the nightmarish orange tones of his skullet above.

Maybe it is the wonderfully naïve positivity of the poem on the back cover that freaks my boobies so, feeling very alien 52 years later. For the record I have no problem with the Pentagon being turned on its side and painted purple, yellow and green, but I do take issue with his wish that ‘The concept of work was forgotten’ – give it 2 months without your bins being emptied, no post deliveries, artisanal bakeries being closed and then let’s talk again Terry. Minimalists, eh?

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Gentle reader, ignore my 80’s forged cynicism and let’s set the Bongos of Benignity back to 1969 and try and imagine what A Rainbow In Curved Air would have sounded like back then.

Like nothing else on Earth is the flip answer. I get slightly confused as to which American minimalist did what first, but basically Terry Riley is my joint favourite. I find myself somewhat at sea In C his great conceptual masterpiece but I took to A Rainbow In Curved Air as soon as I heard it; possibly helped by the fact that I can vaguely remember the LP being in the collection of one of my parents’ hippy friends^.

Having experimented with making music with tape loops since the early 60’s, apparently using them in all night concerts, Riley cut A Rainbow In Curved Air as two very different side long pieces, the title track and ‘Poppy Nogood And The Phantom Band’.

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The title track of A Rainbow In Curved Air is pretty and astonishing and you can play at counting the number of things you have heard its’ influence on; The Who^*, Laurie Anderson, Eno, Mike Oldfield, Steve Hillage***, a thousand jazzers, a million ambient LPs and a thousand zillion electronic music makers down the years.

The title track begins with a delicious fluttering thrilling trilling of keys alongside and over a steadier pulse. Riley plays electric organ, electric harpsichord, rocksichord*^, dumbec and tambourine. The keys sweep you along through the stratosphere rather beautifully, although it is a frenetic and restless piece of music, not an ambient bliss ride – it has the feel of a bird flying fast for the sheer joy and sensation of the thing. The rhythm he generates from the dumbec (basically a small goblet drum) takes us almost into Indian classical territory as the piece progresses, adding purpose and a sense of journey.

‘A Rainbow In Curved Air’ is an astonishing and very enjoyable piece of music listened to now without any historical context, to listen to it knowing it was the start of so much more that was to come is really something. That harshest music critic of all, Mrs 1537, loved it and refused to believe me when I told her when it was from.

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‘Poppy Nogood And The Phantom Band’ is a more interesting piece than the daft name suggests, albeit less sunny than the title track. Composed for soprano sax and electric organ, the piece is spliced ‘mirrored’ and overlaid, the overall effect being somewhat akin to listening to the music of the spheres overlooking a vast plain of shattered glass during a beautiful sunset.

The music is something else, taking his cue from La Monte Young, Riley harnesses a low-end drone throughout, anchoring the piece as the sax swirls and skirls up and away. The result is unsettled, questing music especially when the editing is choppy and occasionally touching on discord. ‘Poppy Nogood…’ is a piece that seems to revel in this flux and change, which is resolved, after a fashion, by the end.

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I find A Rainbow In Curved Air to be that rarest of things, genuinely spiritual music. There is a sense of optimism and a sense of striving towards purer forms that you don’t often encounter in music. It is uplifting stuff, even for nasty little cynics like me and betokens the workings of a rather pure and beautiful soul. Heady stuff, literally according to the front cover.

That this supremely innovative LP manages to straddle the nexus between minimalist composition and something far more populist is what has propelled it towards being as influential as it is loved, no mean feat at all.

‘National flags were sewn together into brightly coloured circus tents under which politicians were allowed to perform harmless theatrical games‘, Mr Riley may have something there after all.

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My copy of A Rainbow In Curved Air is not some long-hoarded family heirloom, passed down from a beatnik uncle but a 2019 clear vinyl 50th anniversary edition limited to 750 copies; now retailing for about £5 less than I paid for it, ho-hum. The sound is impressively good.

There is a wry smile to be had at the fact that music as wholesome and well-intentioned as this bears a sticker saying ‘as featured in Grand Theft Auto IV – everybody’s favourite source of misogynistic ultraviolence’. Okay, so I made that up a small bit.

1079 Down.

*no stranger to a large forehead myself, I remain impressed by the fact that there was room to write his name and the LP title in a nice cursive font across Terry’s.

**watch out for benignity, that’s how they get you.

^even as quite a young kid I would also rifle my way through people’s collections when I got the chance. Fact: everyone my parents knew owned a copy of Santana’s Caravanserai.

^*Townsend used Riley’s surname in ‘Baba O’Riley’ as a nod to the keyboard influence.

***a meaner critic than I would suggest that his excellent Rainbow Dome Musick sounds like ‘A Rainbow In Curved Air’ with a tap running in the foreground. I thought it.

*^tres cool. I have never looked this up in case I am disappointed, I picture it being a nine foot high keyboard carved from obsidian, studded with black diamonds and surmounted by an enormous grinning skull.