The owner of a discotheque in Philadelphia is responsible for the first full contact between minimal music and popular music. In 1968, he commissioned the minimal music pioneer Terry Riley to compose a kind of signature melody for his nightclub. But instead of writing something of his own, Riley took a recently published R'n'B number and turned it to the left: He completely reassembled Harvey Avernes' three-minute "You're No Good" using tape recorders and a sine wave generator. At the end there was a 21-minute freak-out - the first remix in pop history. Riley had transformed the soulful source material into a psychedelic sound collage, in which verse and chorus intertwine, the chorus is staccato-like mounted one behind the other and the vocal tracks are multiplied and arranged time-shifted like a canon. Electronic noise and the sound of the spooling tape also found their way into the processing. No one took note of this groundbreaking work, of course.
