In Conrad’s opening essay that serves as liner notes to his 1996 box set Tony Conrad: Early Minimalism, Volume One, he recounts his invigorating introduction to drone music. He writes, “Feeling the leveraging capability of drone playing in Indian music made me imagine what other new musics might spring from a drone, set within a less authoritarian and tradition-ridden performance idiom.” His invocation here of the plural term, musics, seems significant to highlight: it implies that Conrad’s approach to experimentation was open-ended, not single-minded. In his pursuit of a “new musical culture,” he engaged in manifold musical expressions, many located within the expansive space of the drone. In a few short lines that serve as the only text printed within the booklet accompanying Day of Niagara, Conrad re-asserts his enthusiasm for various forms of new musics—even casting his eyes beyond the limitations of the category:

What I had learned first about John Cale was that he had written a piece which pushed a piano down a mine shaft. We hungered for music almost seething beyond control—or even something just beyond music, a violent feeling of soaring unstoppably, powered by immense angular machinery across abrupt and torrential seas of pounding blood.

While the term “experimental music” has by now been codified to describe a set of mid-twentieth-century compositional practices stemming from the influence of John Cage, Conrad’s approach to music-making during the 1960s and 1970s reflects a more straightforward invocation of the word “experimental.” Acted out as a series of untested propositions, his experiments included independent musical and multimedia pieces; word-based compositions; a short stint in the Velvet Underground’s precursor band, the Primitives; the creation of film soundtracks using found materials and his own created machines; and live, at times informal, recordings made in collaboration with other musical innovators. Moving chronologically through a selection of recordings, works, and anecdotes that span 1961 through 1972, we can trace Conrad’s artistic path through these overlapping bursts of experimentation. Though the few examples provided here do not likely begin to account for the totality of his musical efforts during this time, together they provide a sketch of what must have been an intense period of artistic and musical exploration and expansion for Conrad.

Beginning even before his move to New York, we can look to his 1961 score This Piece Is its Name as the beginning of a thread that would weave through much of his work across the era. Conrad describes the work at length in an interview:

I made a piece that I called This Piece Is its Name in response to a lot of the people around the Fluxus scene who were writing scores that often took the form of instructions, like “boil the telephone.” Often very cool things to do; but I was not sure that I was happy giving people instructions of what to do because I didn’t want to be instructed to do things. And I wondered what the function of these scores was anyway? I thought maybe there’s a way to get away altogether from the principle of instructing someone to “do something,” which is what I disliked about music lessons and playing checkers…. I felt that it might be interesting to make some “pieces” that did not require fulfillment by a performer. This Piece Is its Name went into a kind of black hole of tautological space where the piece became self-sufficient and didn’t bother to have the qualities of institutional support or neediness.

Conrad’s score exists as something of an anti-score; his self-referential, cyclical tautology manifests its completion instantaneously, requiring no outside effort, thought, or participation. This Piece Is its Name reflects his interest in horizontal power structures, as well, with the goal here being the elimination of the separate functions of composer and performer, which Conrad achieves by fusing the instruction’s creation and completion into one simple phrase. This interest in a “less authoritarian … performance idiom” can be seen throughout the examples that follow, many of which also eschewed the vertically oriented composer-to-composition dynamic through collective decision-making, improvisation, and the abandonment of traditional musical structures in favor of the simplified, rationally determined drone.

In 1964, while Conrad was still playing regularly with the Theatre of Eternal Music, he also produced the solo violin work Four Violins and briefly joined forces with Cale, Reed, and De Maria to form a touring rock-dance band. Four Violins was made in December of 1964, recorded by Conrad as a series of separate violin tracks, then overdubbed together to form one mass of sound. In the opening moments of the thirty-two-minute recording, we can hear the pops of the playback machine—Conrad’s stereo reel-to-reel recorder—switching on. Shortly after that, what sounds like a single violin screeches into the sonic frame, soon to be joined by others. The volume builds as the violin strings eek out sustained notes in chorus, the somewhat brackish layers bearing an aural resemblance to electric guitar feedback, with a low rumbling bass underlying the sound’s sharper edges. The connection between Four Violins and the Theatre of Eternal Music is apparent through a single listen, with four simultaneous instruments creating a persistent, heavy drone. Released as the first disc of Conrad’s retrospectively skewed Early Minimalism, Four Violins exists as his only solo recording made during this era, and is explicitly built on the same principles that he explored with the Theatre of Eternal Music. As Conrad writes in the liner notes, Four Violins remains linked to the Theatre of Eternal Music through concept and feeling, even though it was made independently of his collaborators. “I always saw this music as inhabiting a communal ground,” he writes. “Even Four Violins seemed like a gesture that should remain personal.”

Conrad’s other musical foray during the end of 1964 and beginning of 1965 would trade in violin strings for guitar chords. Approached at a party by some record company representatives from the fledgling Pickwick Records, Conrad and Cale (who were playing with the Theatre of Eternal Music and sharing an apartment together at the time) became touring members of the band the Primitives. The two men were recruited to join the Primitives at a party, chosen apparently for their long hair and cool style. Conrad recalls that they had “[very] limited information, but we thought yeah, that we were secretly rocknroll types anyway, and that we would like to do it.” Fronted by Reed, who was on staff at Pickwick as a songwriter, Cale, Conrad, and De Maria joined in for several live gigs along the East Coast, promoting the songs that Reed had written for the label—“The Ostrich” and “Sneaky Pete.” Though the music was played on rock instruments with all of the strings tuned to the same note—which, as Conrad recalls, “blew our minds because that was what we were doing with La Monte in The Dream Syndicate”—the music that the Primitives performed is still a far cry from the minimal drone that Conrad otherwise fixated on.

While the formation of the Primitivies, the punk-spirited lyrics to “The Ostrich,” and the eventual morphing of characters into the Velvet Underground has been chronicled thoroughly elsewhere, it seems fitting to highlight here that the experience with rock music does not seem so aberrant when looking at Conrad’s interest in “new musics”—plural. In fact, due in part to the influence of his friend Flynt, who himself began consuming and creating his own strand of pop music as a rejection of the hierarchical limitations of so-called “high art,” Conrad embraced rock music as one of many influences. “My program,” he recalls, “was to find things I didn’t like and then try to like them.” His embrace of popular music provided an important aesthetic counterpoint to the “austere” and “intense” experiments of the Theatre of Eternal Music, and Cale and Conrad’s Ludlow Street apartment came to be a space of “liberating musical influence” that would have a profound effect on both. It was during this time together, away from the drone-filled space of Young’s loft apartment, that Cale was first exposed to rock music; of course, it was Cale who would eventually leave the Theatre of Eternal Music to focus on his collaborations with Reed, becoming a legendary rock musician as a founding member of the Velvet Underground and taking the drone with him. Conrad would later parlay his interest in rock into a collaboration with the German krautrock band Faust. Their recordings together were released in 1973, becoming Conrad’s first commercially available record, Tony Conrad/Faust: Outside the Dream Syndicate.

A recording from 1969 brings us back to where we began—with Conrad’s “invented acoustical tools” and Long String Drone. The first appearance of LSD can be found on a track made by eccentric artist and musician Charlemagne Palestine as part of a radio broadcast for iconic countercultural radio station WBAI’s weekly Free Music Store series. Palestine and Conrad first met around 1968–in the unlikely setting of a Catholic church. Palestine, at the time, was playing the carillon at the St. Thomas church on 53rd Street, across from the Museum of Modern Art. In addition to the requisite hymns that Palestine provided, he used the largess of the instrument to create abstract, experimental compositions of layered sound. These constructions caught the attention of many visitors to the museum, who could purportedly hear Palestine’s bells while walking to and from the building and in the outdoor sculpture court. As Palestine remembers in a characteristically rambling recitation:

I met Tony Conrad the first time while playing the carillon at St Thomas one afternoon between 5 o’clock and 5:30, as I did every weekday for almost seven years between 1963 and 1970. It was around 1968 that I heard someone shouting “WOW, WOW, WOW!” from the spiral staircase that went from the church’s lobby to the bell tower high above. It turned out to be filmmaker and musician Tony Conrad, who had fallen in love with my bell sonorities that he had heard several times before while passing near the Museum of Modern Art on 53rd Street, as St Thomas was just next door. We became immediate friends. He invited me to his studio that was above a 42nd Street porno shop, and where he and his wife Beverly [Grant], an underground film actress, offered a 24/24 hour salon for all the avant-garde artists bohemians and crazies to come and hang out together.

Conrad and Palestine collaborated on several things soon after their meeting, including the soundtrack to Conrad’s feature-length film Coming Attractions (1970) and the 1969 recording Alloy (Golden 1).