STEVE REICH | Four Organs / Phase Patterns
This record, reissued by the San Francisco-based label Superior Viaduct, was originally released in 1970 by Shandar, a small French label that made an outsized impact on American musical modernism: in its decade-long existence, the imprint managed to release works by Albert Ayler, La Monte Young,Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, and many others. Like any good champions of the musical avant-garde, they were eventually punished by fate: in 1979, a flood destroyed most of their original vinyl stock, effectively ending the enterprise.
But for a while, places like Shandar were safe harbor for then-misfits like Reich. The two pieces here,Four Organs and Phase Patterns, come from an era of Reich’s work when he was still in an obsessively scientific mode, boring down on a single capital-I Idea to extract from it whatever secrets might be unlocked from it. The idea here was his first big one, and the one that he remains most associated with: If you took two tones, set them apart from each other, and then moved them in and out of frequency incrementally, you could push open a gate of perception. The idea began with tape loops, but Reichsoon moved it into live instrumentation, and then pushed its way into larger forces, where that original idea could be heard more as a whisper more than a shriek. Here, it is the work of four monomaniacally focused musicians: The Farfisas are played by Steve Reich and Philip Glass, joined by Arthur “Art” Bixler Murphy and Steve Chambers, while Jon Gibson supplies the steady maraca shakes…(Jayson Greene | Pitchfork)