Music Arcades: Steve Reich: Early Works

I was dead excited about this album when it was announced, and I snapped it up on release. This came from the frustration of reading about pieces like the tape pieces, Come Out and It's Gonna Rain but never having the opportunity to hear them.

I'm still pretty excited about it now, having spent the afternoon, knocked out by a cold and six hours alone with the Boy this morning, playing those same pieces quite loud. I've seen some reviews that say these examples of unadorned early minimalism are too hardcore for anyone except the intellectually curious. I disagree. I think they show, clearly and with elegant simplicity, how this kind of minimalism works. Listening to the phase-shifting pieces is like having a series of Bridget Riley images flashed at you. Very soon you're not sure whether the changes you hear are out there in the music or in here in your head as the focus of your attention shifts. Sometimes the sound stabilises; then a bundle of changes come in short order, each one triggering another. It's like that old zen thing, "Not the flag, not the wind; mind is moving." Except, of course, it's not.

I'm not entirely sure why I feel it's also significant that all the phase shifting is resolutely analogue in nature — whether achieved by tape reels or human performers — but I do.

These are cornerstone works and they're a fascinating listen. Without these, no (No Pussyfooting) for sure, but, more significantly, I reckon about 10% of all popular music recorded in the last thirty years would sound different. Their influence extends a thousandfold beyond the number who have ever heard them.

And let me pre-empt you arguing that this is all a dry, academic exercise, because Reich, as usual, chooses his material with such pointed grace, evoking the Civil Rights struggle in Come Out and apocalypse (Cold War or otherwise) in It's Gonna Rain. By contrast, Alvin Lucier's I am Sitting in a Room (also a tape piece for spoken voice, and another instance of what Reich called Music as a Gradual Process) is a more purely intellectual experience, albeit a fascinating one. I am listening to the 45-minute version of it as I type. There comes a point when my ears say, "enough!"