Goodbye to Language

Tony Conrad: Writings

Edited by Constance DeJong and Andrew Lampert, Primary Information, $24

THE LATE TONY CONRAD’S WORK IS CHARACTERIZED BY an endlessly imaginative interrogation of the forms of communication by which we describe experience. From the series of “Yellow Movies” (long-form “moving images” comprised of taped-off rectangles of (1966), to the epochal minimalist “dream music” he created with La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and John Cale in the mid-1960s, Conrad sought to strip languages of culture down to their basics and manipulate the irreducible complexity that was revealed. His work is startling, playful, and almost always ahead of the curve.