wanted to disrupt the flow of time. The budding composer had spent a few years experimenting with tape loops and Echoplex delay units back in the Bay Area, where he was part of the San Francisco Tape Music Center alongside fellow mavericks , , and . In 1963, Riley went to Paris, where he moonlighted as a nightclub pianist and composed music for , an experimental theater piece by American performance artist Ken Dewey.
Working with and his band, Riley recorded each player separately in order to manipulate their parts, in an early form of remixing; he asked a studio engineer if it would be possible to create a looping delay, imagining a sound that might build up “ .” The engineer’s solution was to run the tape through a pair of reel-to-reel recorders—one set to record and the other to play, with the second machine feeding back into the first. The results were revelatory.
Years later, to jazz guitarist , Riley described the effect as a hypnotic synthesis of intention and surprise. “It has a geometric order and a periodicity, but it becomes this gently moving landscape, so things come into it and fade out of it..
.You get this caravan of ideas that go on and on, and constantly change.” Riley came up with an appropriately science-fiction-sounding name for it: the time-lag accumulator.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Riley applied his time-lag accumulator in different contexts. On electric organ, he experimented with long delays of several seconds or more that allowed .