I first discovered Erik Satie on Blood, Sweat and Tears' album Blood, Sweat & Tears. It opened and closed with variations of Satie's Trois Gymnopedies. All links thanks to Brian Lamb at Scribbler, which is now on my blogroll.

FLABBY PRELUDES FOR A DOG: AN ERIK SATIE PRIMER

In the midst of an art opening at a Paris gallery in 1902, Ambient music was born. Erik Satie and his cronies, after begging everyone in the gallery to ignore them, broke out into what they called Furniture Music-- that is, background music--music as wallpaper, music to be purposely not listened to. The patrons of the gallery, thrilled to see musicians performing in their midst, ceased talking and politely watched, despite Satie's frantic efforts to get them to pay no attention.
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Erik Satie

Erik Satie's VEXATIONS

Written between 1893-95, "Vexations" became Satie's most celebrated work for the simple reason that this short piano piece had the instructions to be played 840 times. It was shrugged off as a joke for decades until 1963 when John Cage got a team of pianists together and tacked the whole thing in 18 hours. It's since been performed many times but rarely by one pianist. Most pianists, even after hours and hours of playing the work experience a sort of amnesia and can't remember the tune that they were playing at all. Pianists have also been know to experience hallucinations while performing the work, testifying to it's mystical inducing qualities. Gavin Bryars once referred to "Vexations" as a kind of poor man's "Ring of the Nebelung".
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I've put up an MP3 of Vexations for your downloading pleasure. The file is 888kb and runs for 55 seconds. Just set it on repeat and listen to it 840 times. It's great for blogging. I've had it on for a couple of hours but I haven't started hallucinating — yet.