Entering The Dream House: A Musical Institution At 275 Church Street, NYC

Over a career spanning more than half a century, La Monte Young is perhaps the great survivor of American experimental music. Together with his wife, Marian Zazeela, Young and fellow sonic explorers Tony Conrad and Angus MacLise formed the Theatre of Eternal Music collective.

Young is still very much a practicing musician well into his ninth decade, and this episode of Sound and Space takes listeners to the space Young and Zazeela created for their music: a flat near Canal Street in New York City that has come to be known as The Dream House. In this flat, Young and Zazeela, along with another musical artist, Jung Hee Choi, create a continuous sonic experience that seeks to push music to its most fundamental and expansive edges. 

The first two thirds of the podcast feature Young, Jung, and Zazeela discussing their project. Young gives a brief history of the idea's origins and speaks about the centrality of the sine wave to his musical practice—a sine wave is a single frequency signal that is perhaps more frequently referred to as a 'drone'.

Jung describes The Dream House as a site where "the aural experience becomes spatial coordinates and space becomes tone". Young notes that a listener's movement in space changes sound as sound permeates a space, creating a kind of Heisenbergean dynamic whereby no two visitors hear the exact same sound.

Later in the programme, the presenter, the always enthusiastic Elia Einhorn, speaks to a Dream House enthusiast Avey Tare of the band Animal Collective. Tare began as a fan of Fluxus and Young at university in New York, and then one day he simply decided to drop by The Dream House to see what it was like. He speaks of being "consumed by the drone", no doubt just as Young would hope. Tare has become a regular visitor, as have other NYC music legends.

For music fans in New York who are interested in the City's living musical heritage, a pilgrimage to The Dream House should be high on the agenda.