Sunday Synth Jam: Here’s a performance of Steve Reich‘s 1968 process music piece, Pendulum Music, by Simon Acevedo, Mathieu Cart, Simon Paccaud & Olivier Schuppisser.
In Pendulum Music, three or more microphones are suspended by their cables over the speakers that they are connected to. The microphones are set in motion, creating overlapping patterns of feedback. Continue reading
Steve Reich is featured in this interview from The Music Show on ABC Radio National.
Rech has, throughout his career, bounced back and forth between electroacoustic work and music for non-traditional ensembles of traditional instruments.
Developer Gregorio Zanon has announced uPhase+ – a new app for iOS that’s designed to let you improvise with phased sequences.
As shown in the above demo, uPhase lets you play sequences of different lengths against each other, creating complex patterns. This type of canonical phasing is a key element in Steve Reich’s early electronic and acoustic work.
To make things even more interesting, uPhase+ lets you distribute your sequences over a collection of networked iOS devices.
Back in 1967, composer Steve Reich scored a conceptual music piece, Slow Motion Sound. The score reads:
Very gradually slow down a recorded piece to many times its
original length without changing its pitch or timbre at all.
Reich explained Slow Motion Sound like this:
Slow Motion Sound (1967) has remained a concept on paper because it was technologically impossible to realize.
The basic idea was to take a tape loop, probably of speech, and ever so gradually slow it down to enormous length without lowering its pitch. In effect it would have been like the true synchronous sound track to a film loop gradually presented in slower and slower motion.
The roots of this idea date from 1963 when I first became interested in experimental films, and began looking at film as an analog to tape. Extreme slow motion seemed particularly interesting since it allowed one to see minute details that were normally impossible to observe. The real moving image was left intact with only its tempo slowed down.
45 years later, computer technology has made Reich’s concept possible, and R. Luke DuBois the possibilities with Vertical Music, embedded above.
In preparation for the 2012 Bloc Festival, organizers interviewed the headliners, including pioneering electroacoustic and classical composer Steve Reich.
Reich talks about the relationship between West African and Balinese music and his early tape loop music. He goes on to discuss how this affected his early works.
Reich’s work has been tremendously influential in electronic music, and is echoed in works by Tangerine Dream, Mike Oldfield, The Orb and many others.
It’s Steve Reich‘s 75th birthday – and we couldn’t let the day go by without recognizing him.
Reich is one of the great living American classical composers, as influential in the world of popular music as he has been in the world of classical.
His influence on electronic musicians has been indelible. You can’t listen to 80′s Tangerine Dream, for example, without hearing echoes of Reich. And electronic musicians like The Orb have been sampling Reich for decades.
Some of Reich’s earliest works were electroacoustic pieces that explored the shifting phase relationships between multiple copies of the same tape loop. His early tape experiments, along with his studies of African and Balinese music, have been some of the biggest influences on his work, throughout his career.
Embedded above is Section VI from Music For 18 Musicians, which is a modern classic and offers a great introduction to Steve Reich’s work.