In their search for absolutes, a number of music critics have looked to Riley as the definitive starting point for various trends: minimalism, extreme repetition, all-night trance improvisations and tape-delay systems. Pieces such as In C, A Rainbow In Curved Air, and Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band were important in their time because they signalled two important changes in the way the worlds of music and comerce worked. One: a composer was writing pieces which had grooves and improvised around modes (just like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Frank Zappa and half the rock bands in Psychedelia), which sounded as if psychotropics had been involved at some stage of the compositional process, which explored new technology and studio processing. Two: the albums were packaged by Columbia as rock albums, despite being on the Masterworks series, so implying that the razor wire dividing so-called classical, rock, jazz, art and commerce had been cut in a few places. Never mind the embarrasing occurence of hippie-speak on the In C sleevenotes - 'No preconceptions, you just dig it' - the sort of thing that Oliver Stone might exhume for another chapter of his Sixties revisionism. The music, as musicians and sleevenote writes love to say, spoke for itself. Essentially modest, Riley downplays all of this. After all, his contribution to the late 20th Century mix emerged out of collaborative work and improvisations with La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros and Chet Baker. After the first flush of enthusiasm for minimalism and systems music, Riley and Young tended to be dismissed as old hippies, past their peak, while Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams and Michael Nyman slid with varying degrees of compositional credibility into a new orthodoxy of avant-garde populism. But as Riley says, life goes in cycles. Suddenly, the open works of Riley and Young seem more expansive, more useful to the fractured nature of music in the Nineties than all that knitting machine repetitiveness and it's mutations.

-- David Toop excerpt from his book "Ocean of Sound" published by Serpents Tail