The one feature that usually sets Terry Riley’s music apart from all the electronic minimalists and new age hucksters that followed in his path is just intonation, a method of tuning instruments in which the frequency of notes are related by ratios of small whole numbers. The end result is a harmonic sound different from modern (post 18th century) western harmony that instead leans toward a sound more similar to ancient music from around the world, particularly Asia. Its this just intonation that gives Riley’s music a natural grit that raises it above overly pretty new age homogeneity and makes it part of the natural world of wind whistling through the branches and small life setting a field a buzz with minute interconnecting noises.
Shri Camel is similar to other well-known Riley masterpieces, such as Rainbow in Curved Air, in that the major sound component is Riley’s interweaving electronic keyboard lines treated with slightly psychedelic production. The difference with Camel is a more stately classical Asiatic sound that is accented with a more severe just intonation than usual and a slower unfolding of events that mimics classic Chinese and Korean court music. The end result is one of the finest compositions in Riley’s career and one of the most beautiful albums I own. —JS
Future Holden Caufields, venturing out into the big bad city just two decades later, would have no need to feel so alienated — not with Central Park Be-Ins to take part in and Terry Riley’s A Rainbow In Curved Air providing the imaginary soundtrack. Riley’s LP – produced in ’67 once again by Music Of Our Time overseer David Berhman- is the most blatantly pop-friendly of all experimental albums up until Philip Glass’s Glassworks (the latter designed for an upscale yuppie audience which didn’t exist at the height of the Vietnam war.) No such compromises on Riley’s part–his loose, drony improvisations, heard here in gloriously overdubbed three dimensions, appealed to eager, young ears opened up by the raga craze and all sorts of other Eastern “space.” And despite his benign, hippie veneer, the composer didn’t neglect the dark side of Aquarius either, as the ominous psychedelic swirl of “Poppy Nogood & The Phantom Band,” with its dense overlay of reeds, organ and tape loops, demonstrates ad infinitum. –SS
