The Lord of The Drone: Pandit Pran Nath and the American Underground

I have been remiss recently with my clunky dear old blog, but perhaps this will explain why, my just-published story on Pandit Pran Nath for the wonderful folks at Bidoun Magazine, who were kind enough to post it in its entirety online. Please check it, along with some great photos shared by the incomparable La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, at Bidoun's web site. Here's the teaser...

First comes the drone of the sci-fi supercharged tamburas, fluxing and oscillating, too high up in the mix for the bureaucrats and professors at All India Radio, way too high. It’s like the rush of a marsh on a midsummer night with a million crickets, or the howling wind stirring the power lines outside a cabin in backwoods Idaho, or the hushed roar of the stream in front of a hermit’s cave above Dehradun: see the blue-throated god lying there, recumbent and still, his eyes shut, the dangerous corpse of the Overlord waiting for the dancing feet of his bloody, love-mad consort.

Stay tuned for more on this story, including a playlist of the music I listened to for this piece very soon. And I'm researching the follow-up even as you read this, another story for Bidoun on the first ten years of Dia Art Foundation, which funded La Monte Young and Pandit Pran Nath, along with a (very) few others you may have heard of: James Turrell's Roden Crater, Walter De Maria's Lightning Field, Donald Judd's Marfa project, Dan Flavin's one-man museum in Bridgehampton... Time to take a fresh look at this history and the forces behind the stunted version we now have. Stay tuned for more, but as usual do not click the read more link after this...