Terry Riley - "A Rainbow In Curved Air" 1967

Music lovers beware. There´s no going back from here! The first Terry Riley I heard, picked it up at Rob & Elly´s in Nijmegen. It´s natural music, flows like water, flows like life. Worth getting into and thinking about.

Terry Riley - A Rainbow In Curved Air

CBS, 1967

From Wikipedia:

"A Rainbow in Curved Air is the second album by experimental music and classical minimalism pioneer Terry Riley.

1970s progressive rock band Curved Air named itself after this album.

The album inspired Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" and Pete Townshend's synthesizer parts on The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again" and "Baba O'Riley", the latter named in tribute to Riley and to Meher Baba.

Some of the music on this album was used as the background accompaniment of The Guide in the original BBC Radio 4 series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

Track listing

1. A Rainbow in Curved Air – 18:41
2. Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band – 21:44 "

Also from the Terry Riley wiki:
"Born in Colfax, California, Riley studied at Shasta College, San Francisco State University, and the San Francisco Conservatory before earning an MA in composition at the University of California, Berkeley, studying with Seymour Shifrin and Robert Erickson. He was involved in the experimental San Francisco Tape Music Center working with Morton Subotnick, Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros, and Ramon Sender. His most influential teacher, however, was Pandit Pran Nath (1918–1996), a master of Indian classical voice, who also taught La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. Riley made numerous trips to India over the course of their association to study and to accompany him on tabla, tambura, and voice. Throughout the 1960s he traveled frequently around Europe as well, taking in musical influences and supporting himself by playing in piano bars, until he joined the Mills College faculty in 1971 to teach Indian classical music. Riley was awarded an Honorary Doctorate Degree in Music at Chapman University in 2007.

Also during the 1960s were the famous "All-Night Concerts", during which Riley performed mostly improvised music from evening until sunrise, using an old organ harmonium ("with a vacuum cleaner motor blower blowing into the ballasts") and tape-delayed saxophone. When he finally wanted a break, after hours of playing, he played back looped saxophone fragments recorded throughout the evening. For several years he continued to put on these concerts, to which people came with sleeping bags, hammocks, and their whole families.

Riley began his long-lasting association with the Kronos Quartet by meeting its founder, David Harrington, while at Mills. Over the course of his career, Riley composed 13 string quartets for the ensemble, in addition to other works. He wrote his first orchestral piece, Jade Palace, in 1991, and has continued to pursue that avenue, with several commissioned orchestral compositions following. Riley is also currently performing and teaching both as an Indian raga vocalist and as a solo pianist.

He has a son named Gyan Riley, who is a guitarist. Riley still performs live. He has been chosen by Animal Collective to perform at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival that they will curate in May 2011.^"

And you can read a nice interview with him here

FILL YOUR EARS