Marimbas and Mixing

Music is Reich Remixed by Steve Reich

This is an excellent album though I can't help feeling that it removes the essential processes of Steve Reich's music. The remixes here sample the evocative hooks and then simply loop them without the progression that is so much a part of most of his output. I suppose if you just listen to one of the un-mixed originals, the process does not immediately jump out at you and is only revealed over time like finding that the hands of a clock have moved after five minutes of watching it with no perceptible shift. Having said that, there is some evocative background to most of the mixes and they do show the plain gift for melody that Reich has. To have that gift and to then be able to take those melodies and shift them to other killer melodies by way of yet more is a rare talent.

The current track is Howie B's take on Eight Lines and it starts with some creaking string samples which I don't recognise though which sound like the straining ropes of a sailing ship. Howie B is always difficult to get along with; he takes everything down to short samples and then just throws them back at the track without any real reference to the source. The Orb at their worst do the same; I sometimes think that their remixes have no trace of the original track though they will probably retain a single hi-hat to maintain the remix tag. Eight Lines is a difficult track to place anyway because I think it is a version of another Reich track.

Think about mornings in the winter, the drive through lightening skies with the trees black against the dark blue. I love that early morning feel especially in the cold as it is now. Full daylight seems oppressive after the gentle introduction given by dawn. I was listening to my daughter read the other night and I had to hide a small clear plastic bouncy ball that she had been playing with. Just by accident I put it to my eye and found it was a microscope in the mould of Robert Hooke's single lens ones and that it would give me a massive close-up view of silhouettes. The view was obscured at some angles by small pieces of glitter that had been embedded in the plastic along with small bubbles and smaller debris that had been introduced at the manufacturing plant. I surmised that a lot of this debris was dust and pollen from the plant in china that the moulding declared was where the ball had been made. This tiny part of the universe, something normally unseen and rarely though about, brought home to me how complex everything is. Even in terms of structure without reference to function, there is so much out there. Introduce atomic forces and then gravity etc and you get an exponential rise in complexity. After going through all these additions to the plain material world, you have to add on emotions and subtle qualities that humans possess and it becomes a wonder that we have managed to create a relatively balanced and civilised society. This is of course a raw analysis of the way things are but that last but seems to reference the influence of tiny things on big events. Are we one quantum event away from disaster? One decaying atom might change the universe completely.

Back to Earth now.

By the way, Shift by Chris Hughes is a much better take on the processes of Steve Reich's music. It uses the original melodies but I think Hughes uses his own processes or those of a sequencer, to produce the required changes. One of the pieces, Slow Motion Blackbird uses one of the processes but has a different source melody - in this case a sample of a blackbird (from a sound-effect album I think because the same blackbird sings the same melody on so many TV programmes) which is slowed down to a length many times that of the original without any change in pitch. I have decided that I have run out of adjectives or maybe never had any in the first place so bye for now.