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The Young Gods publish, on Two Gentlemen, “Play Terry Riley In C”. We might as well say that this is a fertile meeting of two monuments that have helped to shape the adventurous music of the last decades. Terry Riley, born in 1935, is the cornerstone on which a considerable number of artists have relied to free their relationship to the processes and methods of creation; in the same way, the Young Gods have revolutionized, since the second half of the 1980s, the relationship to rock music by converting the guitar into a sampler.
Composed and premiered in 1964, In C is a major piece in the contemporary music repertoire of the second half of the 20th century, and a pivotal moment in its history. To immerse oneself in it is to experience a pulse, a swirling fabric of sound, but different with each completed orbit.
In this album, the Young Gods offer a new interpretation of In C, as a trio and with their own sound vocabulary – electronic devices, drums, guitar, all with a few extra spaces of freedom. From the very first minute, “Play Terry Riley In C” sets up a pulsation that will frame the whole performance. Bone click, underground bass line, hi-hat, guitar, ternary patterns… so many layers that appear one after the other, superimposed, intertwined, interweaving to build a current that carries you away and will not let you go. One could see in it the evocation of a progressive awakening – an awareness of the arrangement of possibilities.
The motto of “Play Terry Riley In C” is that of play and mutual listening; it is also to propose a series of challenges, questions, and musical “maybes” that are articulated in a coherent beauty. Or, to say it with the words of the Young Gods, “to pose the conditions so that music can exist”.
