Originally published by The Vinyl Factory.

Premiered at NYC’s legendary venue The Kitchen in 1972.

The premiere performance of Tony Conrad’s minimalist film and score composition Ten Years Alive On The Infinite Plain will be released for the first time via Superior Viaduct. The drone pioneer died last year.

Performed at The Kitchen in 1972, it featured Conrad on violin alongside downtown luminaries as Rhys Chatham and Laurie Spiegel, who played instruments created by Conrad. The work formed a thread between revolutionary structural film-making and the long-form minimalism Conrad had developed in the 1960s as part of the Theatre of Eternal Music.

“Ten Years began with image before sound,” writes Andrew Lampert, “a row of quadruple projections arranged side-by-side, all the shuffling stripes cascading into each other. Over the next two hours the music throbbed and the projectors incrementally shifted inwards, their beams gradually uniting to form one pulsating, overlapping picture.”

As Chatham reveals in the liner notes, “when I first listened to this recording after not hearing it for over 40 years, it transported me back to the early Kitchen and the heyday of early minimalism, played outside the Dream Syndicate.”

Tony Conrad’s Ten Years Alive On The Infinite Plain will be released on vinyl via Superior Viaduct on May 19 (US) and May 26 (Europe). Pre-order your copy here.