ES7139 CD features Steve Reich ‘Tape Pieces’
‘COME OUT’ / ‘IT’S GONNA RAIN’
We have something a bit different for this month’s Electronic Sound Reader Offer. ‘Tape Pieces’ is a limited edition CD bringing together ‘Come Out’ and ‘It’s Gonna Rain’, two lengthy and mighty tape loop tracks by the pioneering American composer Steve Reich.
‘Tape Pieces’ documents the moment tape loops penetrated the febrile atmosphere of the 1960s. This was the counterculture to the counterculture – way more way-out and challenging than most other music of its era, and carrying a technologically and politically charged message to boot. There was a real modernity and urgency to Reich’s breakthrough work, particularly ‘Come Out’, the first track on our CD, which placed it at the heart of the US civil rights movement and demonstrated groundbreaking ideas of what could be achieved with tape manipulation.
‘Come Out’ was Reich’s first release, originally appearing on ‘New Sounds In Electronic Music’, a 1967 compilation album of sonic experiments that also featured Pauline Oliveros and Richard Maxfield. It was composed in 1966 for a benefit concert in support of the Harlem Six, a group of black teenagers wrongfully convicted of murder in the aftermath of race riots in New York. The track features the voice of Daniel Hamm, one of the accused, recounting to writer and civil rights activist Truman J Nelson the police beating he had suffered after his arrest. “I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them,” says Hamm, explaining how he’d deliberately reopened one of his wounds in order to get medical attention.
The second track on ‘Tape Pieces’ is ‘It’s Gonna Rain’, which was initially issued on Reich’s ‘Live / Electric Music’ debut album in 1968, although it was created in 1965, predating ‘Come Out’ by around a year. The starting point for ‘It’s Gonna Rain’ was a field recording he made of a street preacher known as Brother Walter in San Francisco’s Union Square. As well as the voice of the preacher, whose sermon centred on the story of Noah’s Ark and warned the end of the world was nigh, the recording also captured the sounds of pigeons and cars, preserving the atmosphere of the moment.
Back at his studio, Reich experimented with tape loops of Brother Walter proclaiming “It’s going to rain” and accidentally discovered what became known as phasing, which was one of his defining compositional techniques. Two identical loops are played together in perfect synchronisation, but they then gradually slip out of alignment because of tiny differences in the tape speed. A range of rhythmic and melodic patterns emerge as the loops drift further apart, before eventually reuniting.
With ‘It’s Gonna Rain’, the result is a dense web of overlapping speech, creating what Reich called “a kind of controlled chaos”, the effect mirroring the apocalyptic message of the preacher’s sermon. It induces a hypnotic state in the listener too, as the phrase loses its initial meaning and becomes an abstract rhythmic pattern, repeating against itself and producing new pulses and cadences. The composer later described the track as “the first piece ever to use the process of gradually shifting phase relations between two or more identical repeating patterns”.
Reich used the same technique on ‘Come Out’ around 12 months later. As with ‘It’s Gonna Rain’, the track began with two tape loops of a short phrase repeated in unison, before allowing the loops to drift slowly out of phase. In this instance, the process first creates a subtle reverberation, then develops into a two-part canon, before expanding to four and finally eight independent voices. Although the words eventually become pretty much impossible to distinguish, the emotional force of Daniel Hamm’s testimony remains central to the work.
Now a couple of months away from his 90th birthday, Reich is undoubtedly one of the most important contemporary composers of the last half a century or more. What’s especially interesting about his work is the way it involves the listener, which is something Brian Eno talked about last year on a podcast hosted by American journalist Ezra Klein.
“‘It’s Gonna Rain’ opened a door for me,” declared Eno. “That piece works by making your brain behave in a certain way. You are not an inactive listener. All of Reich’s work, I think, depends on making your brain perform and watch itself performing in a certain way. So I suddenly realised, ‘Oh, the composer isn’t just Steve Reich, it’s Steve Reich and my brain making this composition what it is’. And that thought never left me.”
