Play Terry Riley in C

Terry Riley’s In C is the perfect composition for reinterpretation — indeed it’s intended in that spirit, being a modular piece that allows any number of performers to use any instrument to repeat its motifs as often as they like. It’s been done with orchestral, jazz, rock, electronic, traditional West African or Chinese instrumentation — and in this case, in 2022, Swiss industrial-ambient-kosmische collective The Young Gods have given it a heavy gothic-electronic-Krautrock twist. The steady pulse of electronic arpeggios here makes it an outlier in performances, often veering closer to a darker version of Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4 than anything recognisable as In C, but then the familiar micro-riffs will rise back up and remind us of the source material. As an interpretation it’s been divisive, but as a work of rhythmic hypnosis in its own right it is absolutely wondrous.