"Throughout the evening I would be recording these long saxophone delays and about four hours into the concert, if I wanted to take a break I would just play back the saxophone"

Terry Riley describes a performance method where sound becomes a self-sustaining ecosystem. By feeding his saxophone into long tape delays and letting the echoes accumulate, he builds a layered, evolving texture that can continue without constant human input. The remark about taking a break after four hours is both practical and philosophical: technology is enlisted not just as an amplifier but as a co-performer, allowing the music to run on its own processes while the human steps aside.

This approach emerged from Riley’s time-lag accumulator setup, in which multiple tape machines create delays that fold back into themselves. The result is a shimmering palimpsest of motifs: a single phrase is transformed into a harmonic cloud, then into rhythm, then into atmosphere. Over hours, the sonic memory of the room thickens. The performance becomes less about linear narrative or virtuoso display and more about stewardship, tending a system, nudging it, letting it breathe. Stepping back and playing back the accumulated saxophone is not a retreat from liveness but an affirmation that the system has become alive.

There’s a wry human truth embedded here: endurance concerts demand physical stamina, and the body needs rest. Rather than break the spell with silence, the performer leverages the very material already created to sustain continuity. Audience perception is gently challenged. What is live if the music is constantly generated from moments freshly performed and then looped? What counts as authorship when the echoes recombine in ways the player cannot fully predict?

The method anticipates ambient music and contemporary live looping, dissolving the boundary between composition and improvisation. It turns performance into an ecological event: sound seeds, proliferates, and mutates within a feedback environment. By four hours in, the room itself is playing. The musician becomes a gardener of time, cultivating a process that can carry on, even as he pauses, underlining a minimalist credo: set a system in motion and listen to what it becomes.