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Critic's Review
Brian Olewnick, All Music Guide
In his liner notes to this recording, La Monte Young recounts that his earliest aural memory was hearing the wind whistling through the chinks in the walls of the log cabin where he was born and having been greatly influenced by the beauty and mystery of this phenomenon. This work (its title shortened for convenience to "90 XII C. 9:35-10:52 PM NYC," indicating the time and place of this particular recording), scored for eight muted trumpeters, clearly echoes that remembrance. The musicians play long, very long, single-note lines, pausing every several minutes as though imitating the breaths of a giant. They are limited to a handful of notes and the rules for deploying them are rather intricate, limned in exacting detail by Young in his notes. The listener hears a subtly shifting tapestry where, if heard at all closely, apparent simplicity gives way to a hazy complexity that drone fans will find fascinating and rewarding. The justly intoned notes play off each other in unusual (to Western ears) fashion, creating sonic mirages of seemingly varying depths, belying the superficial aspect of stasis. There is no forward progression in the accepted sense, only a further (eternal, if Young had his way) unfurling of patterns and relationships between tones. This album provides one of the clearest examples of the composer's rather arcane musical theories, avoiding the new age-y pitfalls that dilute much of his more celebrated The Well-Tuned Piano and the obfuscating rock clichés of the Forever Bad Blues Band. For those with the patience, this disc offers some fine sonic treasure.
