Terry Riley - You're Nogood (1967)

Recently finished [skim] reading Keith Potter's Four Musical Minimalists and thought I'd share this rather amazing 1967 electronic work/proto-remix by Terry Riley that's mentioned in it:

You're Nogood is what its composer calls 'a set of variations' on a tune of this name by a New York rhythm-and-blues group called the Harvey Arverne Dozen. Riley was attracted to this source partly because by this time he had started calling himself 'Poppy Nogood'. You're Nogood exposes its borrowed material much more directly, and at greater length while remaining untransformed, than do the other tape pieces. By this time, its composer had acquired a sine-wave generator from [La Monte] Young and also, on loan from him, a small Moog synthesizer, Riley had never had access to a synthesizer before. The result was what he calls 'a combination of a synthesizer piece and a cut-up tape-loop piece', adding synthesizer sounds and their transformations to the basic techniques of tape-splicing, etc. Additionally, he now had two decent Revox tape recorders, giving him much better sound reproduction than before; Riley wanted to give his new piece, intended for replay in a discotheque, a cleaner sound.

'My idea was to make an arrangement', he says. 'So you'd have the tune, a set of improvisations, different loops of the tune: an abstract arrangement of the tune, almost like a jazz chorus. And then at some point, this tune generator which has sweeping and pulsing sounds'. A pulsing figure, taking the rhythm of the tune as its basis, starts with a very low pitch, then sweeps right upwards, at which point the tune itself enters. At the end of the piece, there are sonic very fast, double-speed loops, also supported by the pulses. Commissioned by a Philadelphia discotheque, You're Nogood apparently made a curious impact on the dance floor. Initially, the unusual effects seemed to mesh with the strobe lights and the general atmosphere. When the loops started to get out of phase with each other, however, the dancers were forced to stop and attempt to adjust to the constantly shifting metre, with apparently entertaining results.

John