Angus MacLise sound recordings

Angus MacLise was born on March 4, 1938 in Bridgeport, CT. He studied various genres of percussion and dance, performing with several ensembles before entering the downtown New York City music scene. In the early 1960s, he wrote and published poetry through Dead Language Press, which he co-founded with filmmaker Piero Heliczer. The press also published MacLise's combination calendar/poem, Year, which assigned names to each day of the year. MacLise was a member of La Monte Young's Theater of Eternal Music with John Cale, Tony Conrad, Marian Zazeela, and Terry Riley. In 1965, MacLise lived with Cale and along with him, Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison, formed the musical group The Velvet Underground. MacLise performed with them regularly throughout the year but quit in late 1965 and was replaced by Maureen Tucker. He played with them again for a few performances in 1966 when Reed was briefly hospitalized.

McLise was a student of the occultist and mystic Aleister Crowley and under the influence of his teachings, began to blend Tibetan mysticism with his music to create sound through various drone techniques. From 1965 through the 1970s, MacLise was active in the New York City underground music scene, integrating trance, improvisation, spoken word, poetry, and electronics into his performances. He collaborated with several notable artists on multimedia projects, such as Gerard Malanga, Yoko Ono, Jonas Mekas, and Jerry Jofen. In the late 1960s, MacLise married illustrator Hetty McGee, and together they played in the musical group, Universal Mutant Repertory Company. The group did a series of performances in New York's St. Mark's Church in 1970, titled "Epiphanies." In the early 1970s, he devoted more of his time to poetry and calligraphy, and also started a literary magazine, Ting-Pa.

Later in his life, MacLise traveled to study the ethnic percussion traditions in Morocco, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India with various local teachers and groups. He settled in Nepal, where he died of hypoglycemia in Kathmandu on June 21, 1979.