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.
DAVID BOWIE
The man without qualities?
On 8 January, David Bowie, one of England's most dazzling, avant-garde, hedonistic and not least richest pop artists, reached the age of 60. Its status is inviolable, but the characteristics of the restless are difficult to grasp. Does the artist character David Bowie not have any characteristics at all in the end?
