If you could actually hear an abstract expressionist painting, it would probably sound a lot like the work of Morton Feldman. And that’s no accident: Feldman hung out in ‘50s and ‘60s New York with Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston (whose work graced the cover of Feldman’s first album), and Robert Rauschenberg. Like the paintings of his visual artist peers, Feldman’s work emphasized tonal color over structure, rhythm, or melody, the traditional building blocks of music. It also employed the musical equivalent of painterly “negative space” with its use of silence and stasis; that Feldman and John Cale were enormous influences on each other will come as no surprise. So, it makes sense that Feldman would dedicate probably his two most celebrated compositions to two giants of the New York scene: abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, whose famous Chapel adorns this LP’s front cover, and writer and critic Frank O’Hara, whose own work drew inspiration from the same sources as Feldman’s. Rothko Chapel and For Frank O’Hara first were released in 1976 on a seminal album from the Odyssey imprint on Columbia Records; for its 50th anniversary and first LP reissue, we’ve had it pressed on 180-gram black vinyl at Gotta Groove Records for the quietest listen achievable, using new transfers from the original master tapes. Profound, career-defining work that opened the door for latter-day ambient composers like Brian Eno to walk through.
