Audiopile Review: He’ll turn 90 next year, but first-generation minimalist composer Terry Riley has never been more relevant. His mixture of hypnotic repetition, spiritually minded improvisation, space-faring electronics, and proto-new age mysticism ties in with any number of contemporary trends. He remains most famous for ‘In C’ and ‘A Rainbow in Curved Air’, but there’s plenty more to explore in Riley’s back catalogue. Those best-known pieces are whirling dervishes of melody and tone colour. By contrast, ‘Shri Camel’, first released in 1980, is stripped back and as focused on drones as on mesmeric arpeggios. Like the work of that great drone master La Monte Young, it uses just intonation tuning for extra brain-tickling effect. But it most closely resembles a more rigorous take on the jazzy minimalist jams of cult new age composer J.D. Emmanuel (upon whom Riley was surely a huge influence). Point is, ‘Shri Camel’ reveals Riley to be both a truly brilliant composer and an acid-fried mystic of the trippiest ilk. Yes, even in this economy, you can have your minimalism on point AND far out.

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In C and Rainbow in Curved Air get all the ink (inc?), but its own somewhat subtle way, 1980’s Shri Camel, the last of the three brilliant albums Terry Riley recorded for CBS, is every bit as groundbreaking as its hallowed predecessors. Not content to rest on his laurels as a minimalist master, Riley studied with Hindustani classical singer Pandit Pran Nath during the ‘70s; by blending that Eastern influence with his own experiments in just intonation (where tuning is dictated by equal mathematical intervals rather than the “tempered” tuning familiar to Western music), Riley made an album whose shimmering textures (played through a specially modified Yamaha organ) seem to change with one’s own breath or thought, like the reflection of rippling water on rock. And while Shri Camel is far more demanding and ultimately rewarding than any “New Age” recording, one definitely gets the sense that its ever-evolving, ecstatically hypnotic rhythmic and harmonic patterns are massaging the brain’s neural circuitry, leaving one refreshed, relaxed, and, yes, maybe even a little smarter than before listening. First LP reissue and long overdue!