Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present

One cannot speak of Tony Conrad without placing him in a pantheon of
greatness, yet for so many undoubtedly influenced by his work, he remains
relatively unknown. Since the early 1960s, Conrad's films and compositions have been the stuff of
legend for artists and musicians everywhere. His vast, inter-disciplinary repertoire
single-handedly created and influenced major film and compositional
movements. He performed in and recorded the soundtrack to Jack Smith’s
legendary Flaming Creatures; he turned the paradigm of representational cinema
upside down with The Flicker; his development and practice of Just Intonation
and Minimalism through his work with Stockhausen and La Monte Young still has
the music establishment scratching their heads; his pivotal role in the formation
of The Velvet Underground has directly or indirectly influenced everyone who has
picked up a guitar since; as an early adopter of activist public access television
he democratized the emerging medium of portable video