He inspired the Velvet Underground, thought Andy Warhol was a copycat, and met his wife while playing the mummy in erotic underground movie Normal Love. Tony Conrad talks sex, drugs and celluloid fry-ups in a power plant in Berlin
Seated in the control room of a decommissioned power station in the heart of Berlin, Tony Conrad is giving me a warning about drugs. “You’re skating close to the edge with nutmeg,” says the 75-year-old waving a finger, “because one-third of the lethal dose is the optimum high.”
This trilby-clad sage has spent a lifetime antagonising the art world – and dabbling in rather more than just spices. His route in came after a degree at Harvard in 1962: he found maths lacking next to the adventures promised by John Cage, Henry Flynt and La Monte Young, experimental musicians whose orbit he was drawn into after he moved to New York. “It appeared as if Schoenberg had destroyed music,” he says, of the Austrian composer who had ripped up the rulebook. “Then it appeared as if Cage had destroyed Schoenberg. Our project was to destroy Cage.”
We played the first drone music. No! The first non-bagpipe western drone music
The Velvet Underground got their name from a book in Conrad's apartment
Continue reading...by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian
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