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Four Organs/Phase Patterns
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| 1990 CD reissue of this classic album, originally issued by the Shandar label, 1971. A core set of Minimalism icons, these 2 works are as significant as significant gets. These are the original and best recordings (there are a few others, none terrible, but you wouldn't want to start out with Bang On a Can's versions, please!). Listed as #4 on Alan Lichts' "Minimal Top Ten". "This is an important and peculiar recording. Important because it is the first available recording of a live performance of Steve Reich's music played by real musicians and moreover by an ensemble. Up to then his main work 'It's Gonna Rain' and 'Come Out' for magnetic tape and the various 'phase' (violin phase, piano phase, reed phase) for solo/duo instruments. Performed by Reich, Philip Glass (today very well-known American composer) on keyboard, Jon Gibson, composer and saxophone player with the P. Glass Ensemble, on keyboard and maracas, Art Murphy, keyboard, also with P. Glass Ensemble during the '70s, and Steve Chambers, composer and keyboardist, first with the P. Glass Ensemble, then in solo. Peculiar recording both for the instrumentation: electric organs and for the music. Reich has used very rarely electric instruments in his music. The choice of four electric organs, here, gives a 'strange' sound to the music, very different from other pieces of the same composer. At a superficial level it resembles very much of certain recordings of Philip Glass in the seventies. In 'Four Organs' (and maracas) it is presented, for the first time, the 'slow motion music': the basic chord becomes longer and longer, resembling the movement of the pendulum that slowly reaches the quietness, the same for the composition that at the end acquires the ecstatic quality of Indian mantras. 'Phase Patterns', as from the title, is based on the phasing process, here more complicated by the presence of four performers and anticipating the results of the following Reich masterpiece, 'Drumming'." |
ARTISTS
Steve Chambers, Philip Glass, Art Murphy, Steve Reich (electric organs) |
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