Ever gazed into the night sky and wondered what it sounds like up there?
"Space," according to the composer Terry Riley, "is surely the realm of dreams and imagination, and a fertile feeding ground for poets and musicians." Of the great American minimalists, Riley is the most mystically far-out. The work for which he's best known – the primitively trance-like In C – was born of early psychedelia, of mind-bending communal rituals and the druggy haze of San Francisco in the 1960s. These days he's grown a long scraggly beard and lives on a ranch in northern California, where the wide-open skies must be dreamy inspiration indeed.
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