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Arguably, one of the prob­lems with Lou Reed’s 1975 electro-acoustic piece “Metal Machine Music” (the first iter­a­tion of which was released on the eponym­ous double LP by Reed)  is that it does too much. The record­ing is of four tracks feeding-back elec­tric gui­tar; the mix puts two stacked tracks in the right and left chan­nel. The timbres of the feed­back are in some cases determ­ined by the tun­ing of the gui­tar plugged into the amp­li­fi­er. Reed also manip­u­lated tape speed and so on. The res­ult is not (and again this is an argu­able point) suf­fi­ciently drony to be clas­si­fied as “min­im­al” or “min­im­al­ist.”
As Reed observed—in a per­haps more sober frame of mind than which he con­ceived and executed the composition—to David Fricke, “the har­mon­ics would start mix­ing, going into some­thing else.” There’s a lot of action in the sound, enough so that some more cred­u­lous listen­ers might have reas­on to have taken Reed at his rather vehe­ment word back in 1975 when he pro­tested to crit­ic Lester Bangs that you can hear sec­tions of fam­ous clas­sic­al works bur­ied in the afore­men­tioned har­mon­ics. “There’s like tons of those things in there, but if you don’t know them you would­n’t catch it. Just sit down and you can hear Beethoven right in the open­ing pat of it.” Mmm hmm. Below, in order of rel­at­ive listen­ab­il­ity (from most dif­fi­cult to almost pleas­ant, depend­ing) are five more pos­sible lease-breakers, or party-enders, or IMPORTANT PIECES OF 20TH CENTURY CLASSICAL MUSIC!

Lou’s fore­bears, and con­tem­por­ar­ies, pre­ferred a less busy approach to their son­ic mono­liths. Take 1) “Fantastic Glissando”, a piece real­ized in 1969 by Tony Conrad. Conrad is of course the artist and musi­cian who actu­ally played with Reed as a “mem­ber” of The Primitives, the ad-hoc trash-rock band that cut “Do The Ostrich,” and which tuned all their gui­tar strings to the same note for a drone effect. Conrad was also, with Velvet Underground co-founder John Cale, a mem­ber of LaMonte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music.
Made with a sine-wave oscil­lat­or and a reel-to-reel tape record­er, Conrad’s piece is as the title indic­ates: a glis­sando, first repro­duced as recor­ded, then reit­er­ated three times, each time at about a quarter of the speed of the pri­or ver­sion. I don’t have the math right, prob­ably. I only listened to it once before fil­ing it some­where that I don’t want to go fetch it from again. It’s a tough­ie. 2) “Bohor 1,” by Iannis Xenakis, first fea­tured on a nifty Nonesuch vinyl selec­tion of the great com­poser’s electro-acoustic music, in not a walk in the park either, but its ever-building noise com­pon­ent at times makes it func­tion almost like apo­ca­lyptic soundtrack music.
While Xenakis nev­er entirely revealed the “instru­ment­a­tion” for the piece, it’s believed he used a mouth organ, and some kind of bells, those of the kind found in orna­ment­al jew­elry, per­haps, and shook them in close prox­im­ity to a micro­phone and amp­li­fied the sound through a mix­ing board to pro­duce unholy loud­ness and dis­tor­tion. Ginchy. 3) “Modulation With 2 Electric Guitars And 2 Amplifiers,” by Japanese super-genius Otomo Yoshihide, is, for all intents and pur­poses, “Metal Machine Music” only without over­dub­bing and tape manip­u­la­tion; the 40-minute piece was recor­ded live, as it happened, in con­cert in Hiroshima, of all places. Extremely clean where “MMM” is dirty and teem­ing with har­mon­ic activ­ity, the drones pro­duced by the amp­li­fi­ers actu­ally seem to change depend­ing on where you’re sit­ting listen­ing. A fas­cin­at­ing effect, provided you can hang with the sounds themselves. 

The only music I ever played on my ste­reo that made my late, beloved cat Pinky vis­ibly nervous was 4) “The Melodic Version (1984) of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from The Four Dreams of China (1962)” by LaMonte Young. It caused Mr. Young, an anim­al lov­er,  actu­al dis­tress when I informed him of this, which made me feel bad. Actually, com­pared to the oth­er pieces dis­cussed above, Young’s work, one of the scant offi­cially sanc­tioned record­ings of his ground­break­ing music, is rel­at­ively pas­tor­al. Trumpeter Ben Neill, lead­ing a horn ensemble, goes through the piece’s four pitches (“isol­ated in the har­mon­ic struc­tures of the sounds of power plants and tele­phone poles,” per Young) over and over again, hold­ing them for long durations.
The micro­tones in the har­mon­ics that emerge dur­ing these drones might hit cer­tain cat-unfriendly fre­quen­cies, but for hard­core med­it­at­ing humans, the piece can con­ceiv­ably serve as a readymade man­tra. This kinda nir­vana ain’t cheap, though; the out-of-print Gramavision CD fetches pretty high prices on Amazon and else­where. Finally, Tod Dockstader’s epic three-CD set 5) Aerial takes electric/electronic drone into an arena I won’t call New Age…but the stuff here, basic­ally edits of short­wave radio sig­nals that the com­poser has picked up over a series of years,  is cer­tainly good poten­tial late-night listen­ing for those with adven­tur­ous tastes. As Dockstader (whose ’60s electro-acoustic mas­ter­piece is titled “Quatermass,” hmm) him­self puts it, “air­waves allow for a silence that is not dead, rep­res­ent­ing a pres­ence even without a sig­nal.” Ghosts in the (met­al) machine (music), if you will.