Music for the Gift

This album brings together four seminal tape works of Terry Riley. The Gift music was performed in Paris 1963 by Chet Baker, with tape manipulations by Riley - the first use of tape delay to fragment, attenuate, and return time, looping tape through twin-tape recorders. The Gift recordings, referred to often by Soft Machine members, is the precursor to the landmark that launched the minimalist movement 'In C'.

Bird of Paradise is a radical tape-manipulation work, the earliset known plundering that inspired Steve Reich's 'It's Gonna Rain'-era phase recordings. Mescalin Mix is a tape-loop recording from 1960-'62, partly inspired by Riley's experience with mescalin and the work he did with Richard Maxfield. For this recording, the tape-loops extended out Riley's window to a wine-bottle spindle in the yard; it was composed for choreographer Anna Halprin's The Three-Legged Stool.

Concert for Two Pianos and Five Tape Recorders was recorded live at Hertz Hall on the UC Berkeley campus in 1960 with a humorous broadcast narrative by Glenn Glasow doing the play-by-play. It was performed by Riley and La Monte Young.