Genre

When pirating music, sometimes it appears in iTunes intact with artist names, sometimes album information, and if you're very lucky it comes with a genre. Rebuilding my music collection, since I somehow can't access the 60 GB of (mostly) my CD collection on my dying external hard drive, my favorite genre was "Unclassifiable," for a Larry Polansky (electronic, microtonal, acoustic, heavily distorted guitars, sometimes a choir, teaches at Dartmouth) album "C H A N G E," but that has now been eclipsed by a Keyboard Study from the album par le GERM split LP by minimalist founder Terry Riley, Genre: Unknowable. For some reference, he is also listed under folk, rock & roll, "instrumental," jazz, "misc," avant garde, and (where do we draw the line?) classical. To be fair, he probably belongs in electronic, world, and new age as well.

My dream is to perform his signature piece "In C" at Wulapalooza, or anywhere else with a semi-captive audience. It's a series of 40-something loops for any number of musicians with any instruments, where you move forward at will, with no conductor. It is, as I believe, a deconstruction of the Western tradition. There's really no acceptable YouTube video for this, but I have a recording from the Node Ensemble concert somewhere, on another computer.