Biography

Tony Conrad (born Anthony S. Conrad in 1940) is an experimental filmmaker, musician, composer, sound artist, teacher and writer. He is also a graduate of Harvard University (A.B., 1962, major Mathematics).

Conrad’s first music release, and only release for many years, was a collaboration with the German group Faust, “Outside the Dream Syndicate” as Tony Conrad with Faust, published by Caroline (UK) in 1973. This remains his best known musical work and is somewhat of a classic of the minimal “krautrock” style.

Along with John Cale, Angus MacLise, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela Conrad was an early member of the Theater of Eternal Music, which utilized Just Intonation (a tuning system based on the usage of fundamental tones derived from the harmonic series of a single fundamental, thereby based on nature rather than an arbitrary division of the octave) sustained sound to produce what they called dream music.

Among other things, Conrad was responsible for the name of the group The Velvet Underground (although never actually in that group himself), and, drawing on his mathematical background, for the naming scheme for intervals now used by most musicians that work in Just Intonation.

Recently he has composed more than a dozen audio works with special scales and tuning for solo amplified violin with amplified strings. Recent releases include “Early Minimalism Volume One”, a four-CD set, “Slapping Pythagoras”, “Four Violins” (recorded in the 60s), “Outside the Dream Syndicate Alive” (with Faust, live in London, 1995), and “Fantastic Glissando”. He has also issued two archival CDs featuring the work of late New York filmmaker Jack Smith, with whom he was associated in the 1960s. Support for Conrad’s work has come from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the State University of New York, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.