On April 1st, Genesis Breyer P. Orridge, Tony Conrad & Edley ODowd performed live on WFMU's Strength Through Failure, engineered by Bil Bowen. Host Fabio took the photos and is the author of this post.
The combined accomplishments of Genesis Breyer P. Orridge and Tony Conrad are legendary and enormous, and are well-documented elsewhere. Over the years, both artists have appeared and performed at WFMU many times.
Genesis first
came by for an interview in 1988, on one of my late nightshifts in the
old basement studios at Froeberg Hall, when WFMU was stillpart of
Upsala College. That was during the early Acid House days of Psychic
TV. (And just last year he came to the station with all
of Throbbing Gristle for a long and
lively chat session in the studio).
About a year
after that first interview with Gen, I met Tony Conrad, and I asked Tony to come to the station for an interview not long after. He
couldn’t be there in person so we did that interview by phone, but
since then he’s performed in the studio twice and we’ve done several
in-studio interviews.
Though I’d been friends with both of them for many years I had never considered the possibility that Gen and Tony might work together: to me they seemed to be approaching their work from wildly different perspectives. But circumstances can sometimes conspire to completely blow away our cherished, previously-held notions. At the suggestion of filmmaker Marie Losier, who’s been working on two separate documentaries about both artists, a concert with Gen and Tony playing together was finally organized.
And this is more or less how these two very unique artists were brought together, along with Edley O’Dowd on percussion, for a concert at Issue Project Room in January 2009 and for the one you can access here on the Free Music Archive. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
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