Avant-garde composer, violinist, filmmaker, and artist Tony Conrad died today after battling prostate cancer for several years and being hospitalized for pneumonia last week, as The Buffalo News reports. He was 76 years old.

Born in Baltimore in 1940, Conrad studied music at Harvard and moved to New York after graduating in 1962, immersing himself in the burgeoning New York underground music and arts scene. He became an early member La Monte Young’s Theatre Of Eternal Music, also known as the Dream Syndicate, collaborating and performing with other drone and minimalist music trailblazers like John Cale, Terry Riley, and Angus MacLise.

Conrad and Cale were then recruited by the young Pickwick Records songwriter Lou Reed to play guitar and bass in the Primitives, a short-lived band created to perform Reed’s 1964 single “The Ostrich” b/w “Sneaky Pete.” Reed and Cale went on to form the Velvet Underground with Sterling Morrison and Angus MacLise (soon replaced by Moe Tucker), taking their name from a book about swinging, orgies, and BDSM showed to them by Conrad.

By the mid 1960s, Conrad had moved into the experimental film world, with his 1966 film The Flicker considered a landmark of the structural filmmaking movement. In 1972, a German filmmaker traveling in New York introduced him to Uwe Nettelbeck, producer of the German krautrock band Faust, and Conrad flew to Hamburg to make music with the group. They spent three days recording in an abandoned schoolhouse in the Wümme countryside, with the result being the 1973 album Outside The Dream Syndicate, Conrad’s first — and for many years only — official musical release.

Upon returning to America, Conrad began concentrating on his filmmaking, video art, and performance art, accepting a professorship at the University At Buffalo’s Center For Media Studies in 1976, a position he continued to hold until his death. After a long hiatus, he returned to performing music when Outside The Dream Syndicate was reissued in 1993, and he worked with producer Jim O’Rourke and Steve Albini on the 1995 album Slapping Pythagoras, his first record in over two decades. A string of releases followed, including collaborations with Charlemagne Palestine and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and the album Inside The Dream Syndicate Volume I: Day Of Niagara, a 31-minute recording from a 1965 Theatre Of Eternal Music performance.

Conrad was scheduled to perform Outside The Dream Syndicate with Faust at Big Ears Festival last weekend, but was forced to cancel due to his health. He was a pioneer in the fields of drone music, minimalist music, and experimental filmmaking, and his presence will be missed. Revisit some of his work below.