Terry Riley

of music that sounds like a rainbow.

In fact, this is very inspired by the Terry Riley piece called a rainbow encouraged air.

Well, it sounds like rainbows.

You should listen to it.

I mean, there's just so much great music, all these psychedelic bands on imperial records so i would just play all this stuff on my radio show grew my hair long and my beard i came back to my parents house they were horrified and i was well on my way to really just devoting myself to music this is roughly the same

time that uh terry riley got a major you know record deal and put out rainbow and curved air right is that more or less awesome

That was also an influential record for me and NC.

You know, David Behrman should have been given the Nobel Prize for what he did, how he godfathered new music in America.

His editing credits include the video games Norco and Perfect Tide Station to Station, as well as the TTRPGs The Creation of Wonder and Forget Starlight.

He also created the generative card game Air, Light, Water, Moon, Shadow, Sky, and performs experimental music as silo homes and you may have seen him give a speech uh at roguelike celebration on some quite fantastic shapes procedural narrative and terry riley's in c matt welcome to the show

hey really happy to be here thanks for having me

tell us about nc

Excellent.

Well, yeah.

NC is this composition by Terry Riley that is like almost, you know, proto-minimalist or launch the minimalist composition movement or somewhere a little bit into be really popularized in a lot of ways.

You know, there's lots, as with anything like this, there's lots of debate around what started when and by whom.

And I would think if the Velvet Underground was the most popular group in the world, then Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band would have been a huge group.

Terry Riley, who you talk about in the book, would have been a great, famous artist.

Maybe Kahn and all the German electronic groups and Kraftwerk would have been hugely hit makers.

And Lamont Young would have become a major star.

John Cale.

People looked at the roots of...

Velvet Underground, they would have discovered, just like with the British invasion stuff, it led some people to hearing American black blues players, right? It would have led people to Lamont Young and Terry Riley and all the different threads that came together for the Velvet Underground.

But he doesn't do this well, in my view.

But it's just not always like that.

So on the first album I made called Rubbed Out, I made all of it in a very small room in my house with... um minimal equipment a lot of that equipment was quite cheap equipment like a Yamaha keyboard that I bought from a car boot sale um an old Roland drum machine I'd had for years I just kind of used whatever was nearby and I didn't include anyone else in the process of making it and so through that process I suppose it sounded quite lo-fi and also I was listening to pop music from the past like Paul McCartney, McCartney 2 and Alex Chilton and I was also listening to Terry Riley and Maha Shalal Hashbaz who Japanese band that would make quite experimental strange pop music or even like indie rock music that sometimes the songs were under a minute long And so because all of those things I just mentioned, what I was listening to around that time, so different from each other, but I kind of wanted to throw together all these different styles that I was interested in making and see how they can fit together and not say you have to finish every song to the standard where it is like a dance track that's going to be playable on the radio or that people, it didn't have to be conventional basically.

And because a lot of that other music I was inspired by was quite unconventional, that allowed me to have freedom to say, this is, that's what this record is all about.

And so that, that, that did have a bit of a plan.

Yeah.

and howard was doing it two years before schoenberg so i i only just i mean i knew about this guy but i only just got hip to him two years ago and uh you know to me it's beautiful stuff so i've been arranging that um and we do uh on terry riley's birthday we perform nc in detroit every year

okay the 11th hour quartet i think a mix of compositions and improvising within the compositions

Yeah, the 11th Hour is the thing that just kind of popped into my head.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But as far as 2026 goes, the Sensorium Chamber Ensemble that's been around for a while, consistently for the Terry Riley's birthday NC concerts in Detroit.

But

I like dogs a lot.

Philip Grass or Terry Riley? Terry Riley.

Oh, it's really tough.

I'm going to say Terry Riley.

Terry Riley or Don Cherry?

I'd have to say Terry Riley.

Terry Riley or Harold Bott?

Probably going to have to say Terry Riley again.

An orchestra piece where like the viola is sitting on the open G for the entire song or something.

There's a piece called In C by Terry Riley, not Teddy Riley, the producer of New Jack Swing.

Terry Riley, the minimalist composer, where the piano and this...

God, probably I've said this on the podcast because it's so ridiculous.

The score indicates that like a young, beautiful woman is supposed to play the piano part.

That's...

Not okay.

Take it up with Terry Riley.