Raga Electric

Henry Flynt was born in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1940. He is both an exhibited artist and an anti-art activist as well as a philosopher-musician.  His work is often associated with conceptual art, nihilism, and Fluxus. 

Flynt’s work devolves from what he calls cognitive nihilism, a concept he developed and first announced in the 1960 and 1961 drafts of a paper called Philosophy Proper. The 1961 draft was published in Milan with other early work in his book Blueprint for a Higher Civilization.  Flynt refined these dispensations in the essay Is There Language? that was published as Primary Study in 1964.

In 1961, Flynt coined the term "concept art" in the neo-dada, proto-Fluxus book An Anthology of Chance Operations (co-published with La Monte Young). Concept art, Flynt maintained, devolved from cognitive nihilism, from insights about the vulnerabilities of logic and mathematics. Drawing on an exclusively syntactical paradigm of logic and mathematics, concept art was meant to supersede both mathematics and the formalistic music then current in serious art music circles. Therefore, Flynt held, to merit the label "concept art," a work had to be an object-critique of logic or mathematics or objective structure.

Because of his friendship and collaboration with La Monte Young, Flynt sometimes gets linked to Fluxus. While Flynt himself describes Fluxus as his "publisher of last resort" (Flynt did permit Fluxus to publish his work, and took part in several Fluxus exhibitions), he claims no affiliation or interest in the Fluxus sensibility.  In fact, he is a strong critic of the neo-Dada sensibility.

In 1962, Flynt began an anti-art campaign.  He demonstrated against cultural institutions in New York City (such as MoMA and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts) in 1963 and against the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen twice in 1964.  Flynt wanted avant-garde art to become superseded by the terms of "veramusement" and "brend" - neologisms meaning pure recreation. 

Flynt is also known for his musical work that attempts to fuse avant-garde music (particularly the hypnotic aspects of minimalism) with free jazz, country blues, rock, and hillbilly music.  

Raga Electric: Experimental Music 1963-1971 is an anthology of Flynt's most challenging avant-garde work that includes Raga Electric (1966), above.  Reviewing Raga Electric for AllMusic.com, Eugene Chadbourne writes:

The disc's title piece may ultimately not be something a listener will return to again and again, other than to perhaps provide an example to curious guests about what might be one of the most extreme recordings ever made. The vocal on this selection will arouse curiosity even among those hearing it all the way on the other side of a large house, if only because it is a vocal performance that resembles nothing else ever released. The same cannot really be said for the electric guitar playing that accompanies this sometimes horrifying vocal; what sounds like (but might not be) a pair of double-tracked guitars, slightly out of tune in junior's garage band mode, take a very simplistic approach to Indian raga indeed. Play the track for Indian classical musicians, and they will inevitably laugh it right out of the room.