Terry Riley In C

Sometimes there is a collision of two different musical worlds that just fits so well that you can't believe it hadn't been done before. Following on from the Africa Express release In C Mali, comes this performance of Terry Riley's minimalist masterpiece by the Brooklyn Raga Massive. Once you sit down to think about how such a meeting of musical minds might work, it all makes perfect sense. The piece consists of a series of repeating cells, all broadly in C major. The musicians play them in order, but have flexibility over how many repeats they make, leading to a type of aleatoric counterpoint. The whole is kept together by a regular, repeated pulse which runs until all the musicians have come to the end. So why would this work with musicians who work in an Indian idiom? The idea of a fixed tonic running through an entire performance (think of the drone provided by a tambura) is shared, as is that of a repeated pulse, here provided by tabla. Improvising with a series of repeated cells that run over each other characterises techniques such as tihayi in the north or those of ragam-talampallavi in the south of India.

The result is a mesmerising, engaging and inventive take on classic minimalism – here topped-and-tailed with an alap and jhala. Simply put, it's a fantastic musical experience that I cannot recommend highly enough.