MAZE presents a re-interpretation of Tony Conrad’s seminal album Slapping Pythagoras — a fierce and unrelenting piece, playfully challenging the idea of Western tuning.
Tony Conrad, a mythical figure in American experimentalism, was a founding member of the Theatre of Eternal Music alongside La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and John Cale, in 1964. This collective became a crucible for drone-based minimalism, exploring long-duration pieces in just intonation. The group’s influence would ripple outward into everything from avant-garde composition to rock and noise music. However, internal tensions broke the collective apart, most notably over questions of authorship. La Monte Young insisted on sole composer credit for the group’s work, a stance Conrad vehemently opposed. Slapping Pythagoras, released decades later in 1995, was Conrad’s response: a sonic takedown of Pythagorean tuning and the hierarchical structures it symbolizes. It’s both a philosophical and acoustic rebellion, a dismantling of what Conrad viewed as the restrictive, elitist assumptions embedded in traditional tuning systems.
Conrad envisioned music not as a system of codified rules but as an open field. In Slapping Pythagoras, sustained tones and dissonant beating patterns erupt into a visceral, destabilizing landscape that resists resolution and transcends structure. It’s music as confrontation and liberation. MAZE’s version of this iconic work is not a reproduction, but a reinterpretation, one that respects the spirit of Conrad’s insurgent minimalism while inflecting it with the ensemble’s own style and instrumentation. The rearrangement was created by MAZE pianist and composer Reinier van Houdt. These performances took place in Amsterdam and Rotterdam during 2021 and 2022.