Terry Riley

condition (record/cover): NM / NM

Recorded April-May 1969 at the 30th Street Studio, produced again by David Behrman for the Music of Our Time series, engineered by Glen Kolotkin and Roy Segal. Riley plays everything by overdubbing onto an eight-track machine recently installed at Columbia: electric organ, Baldwin electric harpsichord, RMI Rock-Si-Chord, dumbeck, tambourine on Side A; soprano saxophone, electric organ and tape delay on Side B's Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band, a studio adaptation of his all-night live performances.

The title track is nineteen minutes of overdubbed keyboard improvisation in modal scales, the most jazz-and-raga-influenced statement Riley would make on a major label. Poppy Nogood, twenty-two minutes long, processes Riley's saxophone through tape echo into a continuous drone-and-melody texture. The back-cover poem (Riley's, untitled) describes a future in which the Pentagon is "turned on its side and painted purple, yellow and green" and work has been forgotten. The Who's Baba O'Riley (1971), Townshend has confirmed, takes its title from Riley plus the Indian mystic Meher Baba; the synthesizer arpeggios are Riley's territory.