Tony Conrad was an American violinist, filmmaker and teacher, born in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1940 and died in Buffalo in April 2016. After a mathematics degree at Harvard in 1962 he moved to New York, where he joined the Theatre of Eternal Music, also known as the Dream Syndicate, alongside La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela and John Cale, holding sustained violin tones for long stretches of time.
That approach to unbroken, sustained sound was taken up by the Velvet Underground and passed on to later noise and rock groups. Conrad also made The Flicker, a mid-1960s film consisting only of alternating black and white frames, a landmark of structural cinema. In October 1972 he recorded Outside the Dream Syndicate with the German group Faust, released on Caroline in 1973. He taught at the University at Buffalo from 1976 for nearly forty years, in the Department of Media Study.