Terry Riley

Throughout the 1970s, legendary American composer Terry Riley toured regularly in Europe, performing solo organ concerts. In October 1978, Riley's personal technician Chester Wood built a stereo digital delay out of an ancient computer he had procured from Don Buchla, and the subsequent tour was the maiden voyage to try it out. Riley's specially modified two-manual Yamaha YC-45D portable combo organ had a Just Intonation setting and allowed him to feed stereo signals to the digital delay. The Yamaha had been manufactured with single mono output, but now with the modification it had a separate output for each manual eventuating in four channels (two live and two delayed). During a residency as a Fellow at DAAD in Berlin, Riley fine-tuned the delay speeds and experimented with different stereo combinations so that by the time of this Paris concert, the tape delays worked well with the tempos he was using. This all came on the heels of the Shri Camel recording Riley had just made in San Francisco for CBS. The musical materials of The Last Camel in Paris are second generational, belonging to the Shri Camel family while manifesting their own distinct shape and flavor.