Tony Conrad

Tony Conrad, (born Anthony S. Conrad in 1940), is an avant-garde video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician/composer, sound artist, teacher and writer.

The Flicker (1966) is considered a key early work of the structural film movement. It consists of only completely black and completely white images, thus producing the title’s flicker when projected. When the film was shown some viewers in the audience became physically ill (flickers can produce epileptic attacks in a tiny percentage of people). Conrad began working in video and performance in the 1970s while teaching at Antioch College in Ohio and the Center for Media Studies, University at Buffalo.

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 (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).

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 sustained sound to produce what they called dream music.

Tony Conrad also played at...