Steve Reich: Live/Electric Music [CONCORD]

Why you'll love it

This 180g Analog Spark pressing brings back Reich's 1969 Columbia Masterworks album. Each side holds one piece, so both get a full, uninterrupted side to unfold.

This edition

• 180g vinyl

About the album

Steve Reich's big idea in the mid-1960s was beautifully simple: take two identical loops, let one drift slightly out of step with the other, and listen to the new patterns that appear. He called it phasing, and these two pieces show it at work in two very different ways. In his essay Music as a Gradual Process he put it plainly: he wanted listeners to hear the process happening as the music sounds.

"It's Gonna Rain" from 1965 is the tape piece that started it all, built from a recording of a street preacher in San Francisco's Union Square. Two copies of his voice slowly slide apart until the words dissolve into rhythm, echo and something close to a storm. "Violin Phase" takes the same principle to a live player, with a violinist performing against recordings of himself until the melody blooms into overlapping figures that nobody is quite playing. David Behrman produced the album and wrote the liner notes.

Reich went on to Drumming and Music for 18 Musicians, and his loops echo through electronic music, techno and post-rock ever since. Play it twice in a row and you may find the two copies start to drift as well.

Also at Kops: more Steve Reich on vinyl · browse Electronic

Tracklist

Listen

On Columbia Masterworks / Analog Spark (cat# AS00060), a reissue of the 1969 album.