artist: Steve Reich country of origin: USA style(s): Minimalism, contemporary classical, avant-garde, orchestral essential releases: Music For 18 Musicians (1978, ECM) Octet / Music For A Large Ensemble / Violin Phase (1980, ECM) Tehillim (1982, ECM) Electric Counterpoint / Different Trains (1989, Elektra Nonesuch)

Reich is one of the founding fathers of contemporary minimalism: an offshoot of the classical avant-garde that takes repetition as its raison d’être and explores its possibilities over extended compositions. An often cited inspiration by art rockers such as Brian Eno, Robert Fripp and numerous others, Reich’s recording career stretches back to the 1960’s. But arguably his most interesting period is represented by the three albums he recorded for German label ECM.

Music For 18 Musicians features pianos, woodwind, female vocals and various mallet instruments. The pulsing, repetitive signatures and slowly unfolding patterns may recall the work of other minimalists like Philip Glass, but unlike Glass the emphasis here is on sustained chords rather than chord progressions. The rich textures, the ultra-cool instrumental precision and the soothing resonance of the Balinese gamelan sounds give this music a beauty and strangeness that Reich can claim as uniquely his own.

His second ECM album Octet contains perhaps the most accomplished music Reich has ever composed. Featuring a similar array of instruments it calls for ten performers, while Music For A Large Ensemble is of real orchestral proportions and features thirty musicians. This is music you can really get inside of, that seems to endlessly unfold from within itself with deceptively simple melodies and spiralling patterns of interlocking rhythms. These engaging, intelligent, gently transcendent pieces reveal new depths with every listen and remain seminal Reich works.

Tehillim sees Reich moving ever closer to classical music, yet still breaks ground in the way it invests his trademark hypnotic pulses with an emotional charge unprecedented in his work. Using a large ensemble - including Farfisa organ and four female vocalists - Reich sets a number of Hebrew Psalms to music over four symphonic movements. In this joyous, often fast-paced work Reich deftly meshes elements of ethnic, folk and scared music into the symphonic structure as if the disparate styles had been bedfellows all along. Yet underpinning it all is that peculiar rhythmic quality that even at this advanced stage of his career remains a signpost to Reich’s stark minimalist origins.

Electric Counterpoint - written for guitarist Pat Metheny - and the much earlier Violin Phase are both examples of Reich’s “process music” which feature a musician playing live against taped loops of himself. Robert Fripp and Brian Eno’s two collaborative albums are perhaps better known examples of this style, but it was Reich and Terry Riley who first pioneered the technique in the 1960’s. The Metheny piece is brilliant, with his distinctively warm, soft guitar tones proving ideal for Reich’s tape loop and delay system which stretches out the melodic phrases into deeply trance-inducing clusters of sound.

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