Chicago Reader - Fulcrum Point presents the midwest premiere of La Monte Young’s The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer

Chicago Reader

by Bill Meyer

November 13, 2023

The influence that composer and musician La Monte Young has exerted far exceeds the size of his slender and erratically available discography. Born in 1935, he presented some of his early compositions at a concert series he programmed at Yoko Ono’s loft in 1960, and they helped shape minimalist composition and conceptual art. He accidentally introduced drones and alternate tunings to rock ’n’ roll when violist John Cale incorporated sounds he’d developed in Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music into the Velvet Underground.