Music for 9 Remixers

Howie B, Coldcut, Andrea Parker and six other studio wizards make a formal case for electronic music's debt to classical composer Steve Reich

By Marc Weidenbaum

Well, not nothing other than--see, the "Riley" in Who leader Pete Townshend's song title was a tip of the hat, in its day, to composer Terry Riley, one of the originators of the classical school of contemporary composition familiarly known as minimalism. Minimalism, as in Philip Glass, John Adams, Riley and . . . Steve Reich, whose aficionados will recognize the Coldcut salvo as a cybernetic tweak on his familiar percussive motifs. Those hallucinogenic, waxing and waning cycles that Coldcut delights in revisiting were directly derived by Townshend from Riley's scintillating late-'60s counterpoint, which was itself indebted to ritual Balinese music.

And Coldcut's plain-stated gist makes an apt epigram for the entire Reich Remixed project: Pop and classical music have a long, intertwined history, from the fence-sitting Gershwins, to conductor Leonard Bernstein's championing of the Beatles, to the rock operas of the Who and Ray Davies' Kinks, to Brian Eno's early work recording the compositions of Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman (Britain's two foremost minimalists), to Philip Glass' recent orchestrations of David Bowie's classic '70s albums Lodger and Low.

Asked for comment on the musicological interplay, Steve Reich says, simply, "Justice here and justice there," before launching into an autobiographical sketch delineating his own place in a continuum that, upon reflection, appears to render the term "crossover" redundant.

"There's a kind of poetic justice there," he says, on the phone from his studio in Manhattan. "When I was 14, I used to go down to Birdland, the reigning jazz club of the 1950s and early '60s, and see Miles Davis and drummer Kenny Clarke, who really turned me on. And later I went to hear John Coltrane as often as I possibly could, both here in New York and when I was a student in San Francisco. Cut to 1973 and I'm in London with my ensemble, and at the end of the concert a man comes up and says, 'Hello, I'm Brian Eno.' And later, in 1976, David Bowie was in Berlin when we did the German premiere of 'Music for 18,' and he came again to the Bottom Line [in New York] and we played a music promotional concert for that record in 1978. That was the first return from the pop side toward me, after I had done what I'd done when I was a student.

"And the years pass," he says, "and now here's another generation, completely different and younger than Bowie and Eno, who are coming at it from an entirely different way. And, you know, it's very nice to see that my music is of interest to those people and it can be useful. Because it's very nice to be liked by the public in general, but it's even nicer to find admirers in the music community, on either side of the tracks."

If Works (1965 - 1995), the 10-CD commemorative boxed set that Nonesuch produced for Steve Reich in 1997, was the composer's coming-out festivity, formally announcing his pre-eminence in 20th century music and displaying his collected oeuvre for consumption and discussion, then the Reich Remixed CD is the after-party. It gathers together nine of what Reich--who is a bit self-conscious about not being entirely up to date on the trends in popular music since, say, John Coltrane--correctly describes as "another generation, completely different" of young music makers.

The collection ranges from the respectful (Howie B's "Eight Lines" maintains the original's off-kilter meter, to Reich's pleasant surprise) through the thoroughly disassembled (DJ Spooky's "City Life" seems to unfold the original and focus on its disparate elements one at a time; by far, it is the album's least "danceable" cut, unless you happen to be choreographer Merce Cunningham).

"I don't think they have anything to do with notation," says Reich, attempting to extrapolate the working habits of his admirers, whose primary instruments are samplers and sequencers. "I think Howie B's 'Eight Lines' is a very sophisticated job. I wrote the whole piece in 5/8, and he kept it that way. Rare to find DJs or anyone else in the pop world who works in a meter like 5."

"It took me a long time to do it," says Howie B, on the phone from Paris, where he is producing the next album by Les Negresses Vertes. "I concentrated totally on the arrangement, building up the different sections that he had originally recorded, and just using them in a different way--turn him on to different aspects. Most of my focus was on the arrangement, 'cause the beat doesn't really change; the groove is the same; the only thing that changes is the actual musicality of it. I had to make that right, and it was a big challenge to me."

Howie's aspirations for his contribution may have been higher than the record company's. He waited a long time for a copy of the original multitrack tapes to "Music for 18 Musicians."

"They turned around and said, 'Can't you sample off the CD?' and I went, 'No, that's not why I'm doing it. I want to touch on the sounds that were there.' It's not like doing a normal remix."

Six more contributions are also adaptations of specific works: Coldcut's "Music for 18 Musicians," Andrea Parker's "The Four Sections," Mantronik's "Drumming," DJ Takemura's "Proverb," D-Note's "Piano Phase" and Ken Ishii's "Come Out." And Tranquility Bass contributed a wide-ranging sample feast under the title "Megamix."

Not all of Reich's work was up for grabs. "Different Trains," his lengthy, and technically accomplished, meditation on the Holocaust was off-limits, even though formally it is one of the most obvious points of intersection between his work and that of his young admirers. "Different Trains" is built to a great extent from samples of voices--his own governess, from childhood, as well as tapes of concentration-camp survivors--and of train sounds. "I think trains are, as the history of jazz proves," says Reich, "a very musical machine. So, working with the trains alone . . . that isn't the part of the piece I felt was inappropriate. It was the other things."

Andrea Parker, who remixed "The Four Sections," says she used to play "Different Trains" in her DJ sets. "Between Reload and Black Dog," she says, on the phone from her studio in London, naming two musical acts. "I always will pick stuff with strings and piano," she says of her attraction to "The Four Sections." "I don't write in 4/4, so it's great for me. My song 'Rocking Chair'--people had trouble with it. Several made a remix, but it's tough to get the gist, because it's 3/4."

This collection is far from a surprise; like many watershed musical events, it has its precedents and its own internal cultural logic. The recent context includes Aphex Twin's remix of Gavin Bryars' Sinking of the Titanic and Philip Glass' string arrangement for Aphex Twin's song "Icct Hedral," but the real source of inspiration is simply Reich's own work. His m.o. was tailor-made for tribute by today's electronic-pop musicians. His twin motivations have been regimented rhythmic percussion and the invocation of sampled material; if that isn't a recipe for a techno hit, what is? His early compositions "It's Gonna Rain" (1965) and "Come Out" (1966) are truly seminal works in sample-based composition, both building music from taped snippets of the human voice. One of the cornerstones of his lengthy "City Life" (1994) is a sample of a car screeching to a halt.

If anything, Reich Remixed is the culmination of electronica's debt to his genius--again, to draw comparison with the Works box, very much a look back. His name has long been a common center-post to any highfalutin conversation among electronic musicians. Mention Reich to Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto and he immediately begins singing the vocal motif from "Come Out." Mention Reich to DJ David Holmes and his response is "Avant fuckin' garde music," meant entirely as a compliment.

And technically, Reich has already been prominently (if anonymously, and without his foreknowledge) tributed by electronica; several musicians have "quoted" his work in the recent past, most noticeably the Orb, whose 1990 single "Little Fluffy Clouds" sampled a lengthy swath of Reich's "Electric Counterpoint." Today that song is featured prominently in a TV ad for the new Volkswagen Beetle. (Reich was unaware of the ad. "Well, I'll inform Nonesuch of that," he half-jokes.)

Clearly, Reich embraces sampling and musical appropriation. This is him describing a scene from Hindenburg, a "documentary video opera" collaboration with artist Beryl Korot that premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last year: "The third scene is called 'Nibelungen Zeppelin,' which is a stealing of the"--he sings the "Ride of the Valkyries" theme--"thing in Wagner. I'm literally taking the Wagner and turning it into a Steve Reich repetition-and-phase piece." Elsewhere in the work, he says, "I have some slow-motion sound of the famous announcer who announces the crash of the Hindenburg, where I stretch his voice out to 12 times its original length; it really gets to what he's talking about."

Reich is hungry for more information on this new world of electronic pop music into which Remixed has opened a window, but he is also reflective of the electronic scene's place in the music continuum. "The 20th century is loaded with people who wanted to bring in machine sounds," he says. "VarËse's sirens, Cage's radio, and for Pink Floyd the telephone and the cash register; Rossini has to conjure up storm music in William Tell. The glockenspiel was a bit hit early on because composers always wanted to write for bells, and there was no practical way to do that. There's been a desire to bring the world into the music, and we now have the sampling keyboard--a huge portal, it's all there."   

Originally published in Pulse! magazine, April 1999.

Copyright © 1999 Marc Weidenbaum. All rights reserved.