La Monte Young Tribute
Étienne Jaumet, Sonic Boom & Céline Wadier

Sinopsis

History has given us a long list of names, but Steve Reich, Philip Glass or Terry Riley are normally considered to have been the figures who most helped American minimalism to establish itself in the course of the last century. Less well known, however, but perhaps even more important was La Monte Young, who squared the circle, clearly showing himself to be the most radical, creative and influential of all the four composers. Ever since he developed his first musical ideas in the 1950s (which still remain robust, revolutionary and inspirational, even today), various generations have reaped the benefits of his principles: from the first sounds of the Velvet Underground, when John Cale and Angus MacLise were also active members of Young’s Theatre Of Eternal Music, to most of the microscopic life of the drone music that we continue to hear today across so many musical latitudes.

The appeal to transcendence, the recognition of the power of the unconscious, time as a fundamental variable of composition, these all became the basic vectors for another type of writing, but, above all, for another type of listening. After producing some important formulations, La Monte Young naturally travelled to India, where he was to examine everything that he had developed in New York in even greater depth, building a bridge between the spiritual aspects and the science of frequencies, broadening his creation even more and increasing the number of his followers.

It wasn’t necessary to be familiar with Spacemen 3’s “Dreamweapon”, in 1995, to understand the important influence that La Monte Young had on Pete Kember and his companions’ vision of music and of the world in general: circular and hypnotic sound, taking us off to other dimensions, between the cosmos and the heart in the east. What we know about Pete Kember, in the meantime, with Spectrum, EAR and Sonic Boom, only further underlines his links to the teachings of La Monte Young. It is his machines, together with those of Étienne Jaumet, another disciple, that palpitate through circular and self-regenerating music, causing the waves with which they weave this rare collaboration to collide and intertwine. Céline Wadier, with her magnificent Dhrupad singing and her masterful playing of the tanpura, is the third indispensable element on stage, causing us to levitate in mystical harmony with India.

With their vast repertoire of tributes to La Monte Young, this trio may go down in history as one of the best and most successful groups paying homage to one of the musical geniuses of the past century.