Tony Conrad and Faust will revisit Outside The Dream Syndicate for a live performance at the Berlin Atonal festival on Saturday 22 August. The Quietus has an interview with drone pioneer Conrad:
I’m excited to bring it to Berlin, one of my very favorite cities, because this will probably be the very last time. After all, it has been over 40 years since we cooked this up, and there comes a time to retire the act. Now that everyone has become aware of what you can do with a sustained drone note, there is much interest in re-visiting these early moments to get a chance of what it all felt like at the time. I feel the same way, and I’m really excited to have a chance to renew my relationship with Faust.
Remembering his days with John Cale and La Monte Young et al., working on drones in the early Sixties in New York:
I had been working with some other musicians including John Cale and La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Angus Maclise, sometimes Terry Riley, and we had worked out a way to play drone music. We were probably the first band in the world to do that and certainly the first band in New York to do so. We were very excited about it. We figured out special notes to play. I think the kind of ideas we had about what to do with drone music were much more evolved than almost any musicians who have been working in this area since. That sounds like a pretty rash claim, but at the time I contacted Faust in 1972 I thought it was true. I had been playing with these other people a decade earlier, from 1963-1965.