Sic Semper Tyrannis

From the Kitchen Archives Vol.2 Live 1977 by Steve Reich (2005)

A Random CD Review from the Stutzman Memorial Library

From the Kitchen Archives Vol. 2 Live 1977 by Steve Reich (2005)

As I’ve said before, the composer Steve Reich is one of the ten or so artists who totally shook the foundations of what I knew about music. It’s lucky that my friend the Excel spreadsheet spit out good old #487 today, because this is an interesting recording and a little on the rare side when it comes to Reich’s catalog.

So, what makes this an interesting album? Other than Reich’s music, (which is typically fantastic in concept, and even more fantastic in sounding), the overall sound is not very far from a bootleg. In just about every piece you can hear busses and trucks and cars outside the theater where this was recorded. The room itself sounds about the size of a catholic school gymnatorium.

Stylistically, two or three different phases of Reich’s technique are represented here: note-for-rest substitution in “Six Pianos,” and “Drumming,” the early phasing technique in “Violin Phase,” (which holds a special place in my heart as the piece which originally brought me to the altar of minimalism), and the concept music of “Pendulum Music”-the reason I bought this disc. Having seen and read about the idea of this piece, I was excited to see that it had actually been recorded. Basically, “Pendulum Music” is the sound of several open microphones hanging from the ceiling and swinging at random speeds directly over a speaker to produce feedback loops as they near the point of being perpendicular to the speaker. I just thought that was a wild idea and was interested in hearing the resulting sounds. To be quite honest, I wasn’t blown away by the sounds. But that’s part of experimental music. Just because you’re open to new kinds of sounds and music doesn’t mean that you’ll love what you hear.

But the other familiar stuff on the CD makes up for it. And there’s an interesting thing that happens when you hear the avant-garde, yet accessible music of Reich broken in upon by mundane, outside sounds like trucks driving away. John Cage would have considered those noises as much a part of the music as what the musicians prepared. I don’t know about that, but it surely inspires a conflict in my head, for Reich’s music is anything but mundane for me. It’s celestial, summing up the music of the spheres and inspires my mind to wander into bigger ideas than our walking around life. But this album, (probably unintentionally), presents both worlds-the world of art and world of city-life, simultaneously. Pretty interesting, I think.

posted by Mike @ 4:00 PM