Tony Conrad

Tony Conrad is an artist endowed with great humanity, intellectual honesty, and an innate, deeply rooted gift for communication. On Friday he stopped in Milan (the only Italian date) to deliver a profoundly intense performance.

9 pm. The O'Artoteca space on via Pastrengo is packed with people (almost two hundred). There's great anticipation for the father of so-called minimalism, as well as for the man who once handed a young, unknown Lou Reed the paperback edition of a book titled "Velvet Underground" (…).

It's an important evening and you can feel it in the details, in the expressions on people's faces, in the emotional tension filling the venue. Mr. Conrad is already in the room and, out of nowhere, starts chatting with the few people nearby about the films he'll be screening shortly. Tall, silver-haired, proud, distant but, deep down, warm and jovial. Utterly loose-limbed. Tony is his music. In his work, in fact, the artist strips away the showy trappings typical of the egotistical composers we often picture and dives into sound without reservation. The fundamental element of his performance is indeed sound as such, its transformation, its transfiguration - that digging into possibilities at the very edge of the infinite and the unheard, which is the most distinctive trait of this musician and researcher.

Shortly after 9.30 pm, he dismantles the "contraption" he used to project his films (one of which will have "Church Of Anthrax" as its soundtrack, a tribute to John Cale and Terry Riley) and, with a system of ropes, hoists a giant sheet that will separate him from the audience during the drone performance he's about to set in motion - one that will thoroughly captivate the lucky crowd.

Behind the sheet: the man himself (the elimination of the composer from the work?), a violin (hooked up to a couple of effects), a lightbulb mounted on a stand, a small fan switched on, and a Samsonite suitcase full of assorted paraphernalia related to the performance (more effects, bows, etc.). The lights go out. Tony's silhouette - positioned in the middle, between the lit bulb and the sheet - is projected onto the makeshift screen. Mr. Conrad begins and, for just over an hour, delights the crowd with the emotional power of his violin. The concert revealed a side of the musician largely unknown to most: passionate, varied, and vividly colourful. Deeply engrossing. Watching one of his performances is like taking part in a Fermi experiment into the sub-atomic realm: except instead of uranium, the matter at hand is sound. Sound as matter: that's the crux of his artistic experience. Enough to leave you frozen, jaw dropped, for the entire duration of the show.

Tony plays a violin fitted with an extra, unsecured string that lets him produce majestic glissandi, verging on noise, pushed to extremes by a distortion pedal and enriched with delay and reverb. Everything works together to carve out sounds resembling a milky fluid swirling around him. After about thirty minutes, Conrad seems to become a black hole around which the whole carousel of the sonic universe gravitates, encompassing every Sister Ray, every strand of space-rock, every Cage and every Maderna this world has to offer. It might just be coincidence, but the white curtain behind which he plays, unseen, plausibly conjures the image of a sort of Milky Way stirred by a small fan… A simple but striking special effect, sounding almost like a jibe at the most enterprising George Lucas…

Once the solo part of the concert is over, Tony takes in the applause and lowers the sheet. The Å arrive, missing Stefano Roveda (who stayed in Verona for personal reasons) but enriched by an Andrea Belfi (Rosolina Mar, Christa Pfangen) in splendid form. The jam kicks off and holds nothing back for anyone: a genuine spectacle that, rather than emulating past glories (or rather, past "Faust-ian" glories), gives the moment an unshakeable identity and a rare, singular originality. No self-indulgence, not a single wasted moment. A memorable performance (albeit brief: under half an hour) that we hope will soon be released and made widely available.

It was a magnificent evening, made even more special by the impeccable organisation of Fabio Carboni and Bruno Stucchi, the men behind Die Schachtel, who set it all up with the utmost professionalism while still giving it an intimate feel, almost as if it were a reunion among old friends… Truly unforgettable.

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