Taking the Back off an Old Watch

Listening to - Electric Guitar Phase - Steve Reich

Something safe has fractured over the last two days. Nothing seems quite right with the world. It is fine when Governments are being incompetent - that is what they are there for - but now they seemed to have crossed the line into plain deception. I know we can never say what has really happened; There is so much complexity and so many individual elements of the communications between divisions of Government that the truth of all this will never come out. I suppose within the remit of the report that no other conclusion could be reached. What does seem excessive is the reaction from the accused parties. The poor victim in this obviously had a problem with someone in authority and that fracture seems to have been overlooked even if the reporters do seem to have exaggerated his stance for the sake of a story. As I said yesterday, the intelligence was wrong though not, we are told, deliberately made-up to mislead. What we need now is an enquiry into how the intelligence was so far off the mark. But then again, the intelligence services are not usually up for that sort of thing are they? Undermines the point of their existence.

Security by obscurity is no security at all.

Electric Guitar Phase is stunning; It is a re-working of Reich's Violin Phase which is two lines of Violin music playing against each other. This as you can guess, is the same two lines played on Electric guitar. Each line is played at a slightly different rate from the other so the interaction and the creation of new melodies from the counterpoint changes gradually, sometimes creating fuzzy messes and sometimes beautiful complexities. Listen to a sample here. The repetition in Steve Reich's work is deceptive; He loves melodies and he loves repeating them. His stuff has some of the best hooks in any music I know but on top of that he can get those hooks to change gradually over time and still have each stage sound wonderful. I started liking the repetition after seeing a programme about Philip Glass. There was no gradual appreciation of this music; I liked it from the start. My Steve Reich simulator is at an advanced stage but as it is completely automatic and ransom in its progression, it lacks the real power of genuine composition. Occasionally it will throw up a great line but the change will take it away to messy confusion. It as more like a complex bell ringing simulator with 4 sets of bells. Actually that does sound like a Steve Reich thing. Triple Quartet on the same album as Electric Guitar Phase, is three string quartets recorded and played against each other so why not fours sets of Church bells? I don't think it would be possible to control the bells sets accurately enough.