A Rainbow in Curved Air

David Behrman, an editor at CBS/Columbia, saw Riley using tape loops, with two Revox recorders, in his New York apartment, and the album became part of Behrman's Music of Our Time series. Glen Kolotkin and Roy Segal engineered. On the title track Riley overdubbed all the parts, an electric organ, two electric harpsichords (a Baldwin and an RMI Rock-Si-Chord), a dumbec and a tambourine, with no downbeats and a non-tempered tuning. "Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band" uses soprano saxophone and electric organ with tape loops, jump cuts and tape delay, derived from his late-1960s all-night concerts; the phantom band is the tape-delay accompaniment, and the sax is inspired by Coltrane. He said in a 2001 Magnet interview, as New Directions in Music quotes it, the Curved Air sessions were the first recording sessions made on an eight-track machine at CBS.

Textura calls it a considerable left turn from In C. Pitchfork gave 9.1, AllMusic five stars, and Christgau an A-minus, saying the title track has to be a fair approximation of the music of the spheres. The catalogue number is CBS 64564 in Wikipedia's discography and MS 7315 (LP) and MK 7315 (1990 CD) at Progarchives, probably for different markets. A remastered edition came from Esoteric Recordings in 2012.