Tony Conrad with Faust – Outside the Dream Syndicate (1973)

Dear John. I’m sitting here listening to the playback of this copy of Outside. I can hear the tape making noise and dropout. I can hear the old Wollensak sound. I wish it were a better copy. – Tony Conrad to his friend John Cale.

Some albums are just a deep dives, the type of listening experience that captures you a little by surprise. You may not like what you hear initially, but the sound and concepts grind away at your brain for days or weeks. Until you eventually go back for another dive into those dark, deep waters.

Now you can start considering the music on another level, forcing yourself to question established doctrine. Your eyes open and the truth is right in front of you: this music is like nothing ever heard before- it’s fucking brilliant! I then usually start asking myself, “Is every other album I’ve ever heard just shit?”

Sometimes I even find myself listening to a difficult piece of music again and again. At the same time telling myself that the music is just too much to warrant further investigation. Or “Leave it alone, Shawn. Maybe it’s better to go back to sleep?“. Whatever you do- don’t fall into that trap. Trust me, you may never reawaken. So, I reluctantly listen again and again. Examining. Judging. „Just one more listen”.

German Krautrock band Faust and American avant-garde composer Tony Conrad’s 1973 album, Outside the Dream Syndicate, is such a deep listen. The deepest of dives- difficult and ever expanding. You should prepare yourself first because weather you understand the album or not, music may never sound the same again. It draws a line in the sand. This is music that could help you reconsider the purpose and meaning of many things beyond music. That strange but beautiful territory between the starkness of the music’s minimalism, and the complex, primatial and violent nature of the artistic vision.

Let’s begin with the music itself; it’s simple enough. The organic and primitive beat that drives from deep within, a non-stop pounding that starts in your head and moves downward, managing to capture that pulsating moment between too loud and hypnotic.

The music on Outside is far removed from the new-age zombie music we have become accustomed to in Western society. The repetitive and driving music of Tony Conrad and Faust is the result of a complex artistic vision, a vision that we may not even recognize at first. The nearly forgotten instincts and impulses that inspired us before the comfort and safety of civilization and the commoditization of music and art. Which is to say, that the music here has a purity of essence.

Think about this as you listen. A drum beat that (almost) allows the muscle of your brain to relax, only to tighten up on the very next hit or beat. It’s an essential place for the music to begin. Like the sound of the womb that is at the beginning as individuals and as a species. The musicians are using the silence surrounding the music as much as the instruments themselves, opening slowly with the rhythm and beats, and becoming increasingly technical. All the while Conrad’s cutting but seamless violin pushing the noise outward.

This isn’t music for turning off the mind, we are outside of the dream syndicate here. It’s not ambient or even drone, or what my father would have called “drug music”. No. This is music that is asking some fundamental questions. You absolutely cannot afford to shutdown your brain. There’s been to much of that already.

There’s also a deep sense of an unidentified spirit. And the atmosphere of a call for prayer. Not a pray that asks for forgiveness, but a prayer that honors what we cannot comprehend. If ever secular music had a higher purpose, we may find it here.

We hear so few albums that allow for this type of examination. Why shouldn’t we ever expect so much? Well, you’ll either discover something important here or simply start laughing at the entire idea. And that’s ok – maybe it’s healthy to stay somewhere between those two extremes. Personally, I’m taking the full trip.

Outside the Dream Syndicate is one of the most ambitious experimental albums I’ve heard. Minimalist music that is grand in scope and philosophy.

by Shawn Ciavattone