The lowdown on this La Monte Young tape: This is a bootleg cassette distributed by Oakland tape label Sanity Muffin. The tape was made in Italy, carries with it no label and all 77 minutes of music from this masterpiece composed in 1962 as performed by The Theater of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble in 1984. For those of you familiar with La Monte Young, you likely have an idea of what this sounds like: A group of trumpets with harmon mutes droning out pitch relationships with slight deviations in tone to produce warm consonance from seemingly grating disharmonies while opening up inter-dimensional psych-portals. For those of you not familiar with La Monte Young: This tape sounds like everything I just typed. And for everyone reading this: A friendly reminder that this piece of music, once only available on the compact disc format that now auctions in the hundreds, is a steal at seven smackers from Sanity Muffin. Nice release… a little hard to read the liner notes, which we’re told have been abridged for this issue of the piece, but a good excuse nonetheless to zone out with some excellent minimal classical music and get in a little research time on a legend while you’re at it.
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