Creativity Quote by Tony Conrad

Conrad is quietly swatting away two lazy myths about experimental music: that it worships randomness (“indeterminacy”) or chases pure, raw presence (“immediacy”). Both are romantic alibis. He’s insisting on something more demanding and, frankly, more political: control. Not control as mastery over an instrument in the conservatory sense, but control as an active, ongoing negotiation with whatever is already sounding around you - rooms, machines, bodies, traffic, feedback. The environment isn’t a backdrop; it’s the instrument, and the artist’s job is to learn how to steer it without pretending to purify it.

The phrasing “right there in your environment” carries Conrad’s characteristic anti-aura instinct. This isn’t about a distant, idealized “work,” safely sealed in a score. It’s about situated listening and the ethics of attention: what you choose to amplify, what you let decay, what you train yourself to hear as structure rather than clutter. The “sound complex” hints at minimalism’s obsession with sustained tones and psychoacoustic effects, but Conrad frames it less as a style than as a living ecology.

Then he drops the real provocation: composition as “long-term growth of interests.” That redefines composing from making a thing to cultivating a practice. The artwork becomes a timeline of evolving obsession - a slow education of the ear. In the context of Conrad’s drone work and his skepticism toward avant-garde mystique, it’s a manifesto for experimental discipline disguised as modesty.