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| Angus MacLise | |
|---|---|
| Name | Angus MacLise |
| Background | non_vocal_instrumentalist |
| Birth date | 1938-04-10 |
| Birth place | New York City |
| Death date | 1979-11-21 |
| Death place | Bangkok |
| Instruments | percussion, tabla, vocal |
| Years active | 1950s–1979 |
| Associated acts | The Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol, La Monte Young, John Cale, Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison |
Angus MacLise was an American percussionist, poet, mystic, and experimental artist associated with the New York avant-garde, the Beat Generation, and the 1960s counterculture. He is best known for being the original drummer for The Velvet Underground during its formative rehearsal period and for his interdisciplinary work that bridged sound art, performance art, and esoteric traditions. MacLise's life intersected with figures from the New York School (artists), Fluxus, and international avant-garde networks, leaving a complex legacy in music, ritual, and underground publishing.
MacLise was born in New York City and raised in a milieu that connected to the downtown arts scene frequented by figures from Greenwich Village and SoHo, Manhattan. His early education included exposure to modernist composers such as John Cage, Edgard Varèse, and Arnold Schoenberg, and to poets of the Beat Generation including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Walt Whitman. He studied percussion and non-Western rhythm under mentors influenced by Ravi Shankar and was drawn to the minimalist practices of La Monte Young and the conceptual experiments of Fluxus artists like Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik. During this period he participated in events with institutions and venues such as The Kitchen, Judson Memorial Church, and underground galleries connected to collectors like Peggy Guggenheim.
MacLise's musical career spanned improvised percussion, tape work, and ritual sound compositions performed in venues tied to the New York avant-garde and international festivals in Paris, London, and Bangkok. He collaborated with experimental musicians and composers including John Cale, La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and performers from The Theatre of Eternal Music and Fluxus. His percussion technique incorporated tabla and frame drum approaches associated with South Asian performers such as Alla Rakha and Zakir Hussain, and his tape collages echoed practices by Steve Reich and Philip Glass. MacLise released or circulated recordings and hand-stapled booklets through underground presses allied with City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, Beatitude, and small presses run by contemporaries like Ed Sanders and Daniel Pinchbeck.
In the mid-1960s MacLise rehearsed with musicians who formed The Velvet Underground, performing alongside Lou Reed, John Cale, and Sterling Morrison in early sessions influenced by the radical art milieu centered on Andy Warhol and his entourage at The Factory (New York City). He participated in multimodal happenings with Warhol-associated figures such as Edie Sedgwick, Paul Morrissey, and Billy Name, and intersected with patrons and promoters from 1960s New York like Tom Wilson (record producer) and Steve Sesnick. Although he left before the group's first studio albums, his presence shaped early rhythmic concepts referenced by later members and by other downtown collaborators including Gordon Matta-Clark and Marisol Escobar.
MacLise combined experimental sound work with deep engagement in esoteric traditions, drawing on sources from Tibetan Buddhism, Sufism, and Western esotericism linked to figures such as Aleister Crowley and William Butler Yeats. He formed ritual groups and performed ceremonies informed by the writings of Manly P. Hall and the anthologies circulated by Theosophical Society networks. His practice incorporated numerology and calendrical systems intersecting with interests of contemporaries like Robert Anton Wilson and Gordon Wasson; he also exchanged ideas with ethnomusicologists and ritual scholars connected to Alan Lomax and Margaret Mead. MacLise's wanderings brought him into contact with religious movements and teachers in Nepal, India, and Thailand, and his work paralleled occult-inflected art by Marina Abramović and experimental ritual projects by Genesis P-Orridge.
As a poet and publisher MacLise produced chapbooks, hand-lettered manuscripts, and performance texts circulated in small editions through networks tied to City Lights, Black Sparrow Press, and underground magazines such as The Paris Review-adjacent journals and The Evergreen Review. His poetry combined Beat-inflected cadences with ritual syntax resonant with poets like Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, and Robert Creeley. He contributed texts to multimedia projects and collaborated with visual artists including Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, and Cy Twombly for books and performance scores. MacLise's writings were anthologized informally in mail-art exchanges with figures in the Fluxus network and distributed through micropresses run by contemporaries such as Dick Higgins and Joe Brainard.
MacLise's itinerant life took him from New York City to Paris, Kathmandu, Bangkok, and Lisbon, where he maintained friendships with expatriate artists, musicians, and writers including Patti Smith, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Peter Orlovsky. He died in Bangkok in 1979. Posthumously his recordings, notebooks, and ephemera have been collected by archivists, exhibited in institutions like the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art, and featured in retrospectives at venues associated with MoMA PS1 and independent galleries curated by figures from the New York art world. His influence persists among experimental drummers, ritual sound practitioners, and underground publishers linked to movements such as No Wave, Industrial music, and contemporary sound art collectives.
Category:American percussionists Category:20th-century American poets Category:Avant-garde musicians