Terry Riley - Descending Moonshine Dervishes Terry Riley

Released: 09/08/2024

While perhaps not as well known asIn C, Terry Riley's pioneering 1968 work that profoundly influenced a host of minimalist composers (indeed, he is known as the godfather of the genre), such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich, the US artist'sDescending Moonshine Dervishes, originally released in 1982, is certainly its equal. Recorded live in Berlin in 1975, with Riley playing a modified Yamaha organ with variable resistors to facilitate tuning in just' (or pure') intonation (a method in which pitch intervals are expressed as a whole-number ratios of frequencies), the breathtaking, largely improvised 52-minute work combines a formalist outlook with a concern with the spiritual sublime. 

Influenced in part by classical Indian music (as Glass later would be),Descending Moonshine Dervishesis full of lightning-quick, mesmeric arpeggios, iterative, mutating melodic patterns, microtonal drones, and complex counterpoint, achieved by feeding the organ through a quick tape delay “ a groundbreaking technique that, while performed nigh on 50 years ago, helps to give the piece an otherworldly, liminal feel that few other minimalist works have achieved.