Song of the Week: Electric Counterpoint
Steve Reich / Pat Metheny
Electric Counterpoint
So after dining with June Brown/Dot Cotton we went over to the Royal Festival Hall for a dose of hypnotic, shimmering and mind bending genius from composer/musician Steve Reich with Bang on a Can and the London Sinfonietta.
Considering that Steve Reich was responsible for one of the best gigs I have ever been to in my life at the Barbican a few years back, I approached with some trepidation – would he deliver? Could he possibly be as good as last time? Could he heck. The man is a legend.
The centrepiece of the gig was the 58 minute long ‘Music for 18 Musicians’, a pulsating experiment in phasing and rhythm. Fortunately for you, I don’t have 58 minutes of web space so I’m sharing instead one of my favourite shorter pieces by Steve Reich, ‘Electric Counterpoint’.
Steve Reich originally composed this piece for Pat Metheny in 1987 and the track is made up of 11 layered guitar parts and 2 bass (beat that 10cc). Guitarist Mark Stewart played ‘Electric Counterpoint’ on Saturday night and I cannot tell you just how good one man and 12 tracks on a hard drive can sound live.
I suspect that some readers may be put off by the thought of ‘contemporary classical’ but if you are in any way a fan of Brian Eno, Mike Oldfield, The Orb or any other ambient chancers, then you need to listen to this.
‘Electric Counterpoint’, 1st movement: Fast, Pat Metheny, 1987
November 4th, 2009 at 11:34 am
Oh, you lucky, lucky woman. I’d have LOVED to go to that. It sounded absolutely brilliant. I got hit with the Poncey Stick for even suggesting it.
November 4th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
It was amazing, ISBW, but probably not quite as good as the gig at the Barbican – but that was with Coldcut, DJ Spooky and Konono N°1 so was more of a one-off ‘event’.
As for the Poncey Stick, I relish it! In fact, I am beginning to realise that I am exactly the sort of tiresomely pseudo-intellectual, poncey BBC4 watching, Jeremy Clarkson hating, London-based middle class music snob that the rest of the country despises. I am, as I am sure many Daily Mail readers believe, exactly what is wrong with this country.
November 4th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Incredible! As a complete guitar geek – there’s a huge Reich shaped hole in my collection. Where would you recommned I start? It reminds of some Penguin Cafe albums or Eno and Fripp’s No Pussyfooting album
Have you checked out the Jeff Beck at Ronnie Scott’s DVD? Incredible, mainly for the twenty something bass player who spends the gig looking entirely amazed at her own glowing bass lines
November 4th, 2009 at 8:56 pm
Mmm, think I’m going to have to let you down gently here Mondo. Steve Reich does very little guitar work. In fact, I can’t think of any other guitar based pieces! Most of his compositions centre around vocal samples, marimbas, piano, violin and percussion, lots of percussion. It’s all very much based on repetition and very subtle rhythmic variation.
This is pretty indicative:
Music for 18 Musicians, pulse:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiV9f1_PFHE&feature=related
(touch of the Sterolab vocals there!)
City Life
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY5_cwN1i74&feature=related
No, haven’t seen the Jeff Beck DVD – I’ve never really been that much of a Beck fan. Should I be?
November 5th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Good stuff – I like both. They remind me of the EG records, and Philip Glass, Michael Nyman soundtracks I used to collect in the 80s.
Jeff Beck, I don’t know that much really his first two albums with Rod and Ron are fab blues funk – his mid seventies pair with George Martin Blow By Blow and Wired are worth grabbing – if only for this track
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXrpIEGq6AA
This is from Ronnie Scott’s, what you want is the bass solo that starts at 1:27
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC02wGj5gPw
November 5th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
It’s like every day brings up a new Mondo fact – you don’t sing, you used to collect Michael Nyman soundtracks?! Well, I wasn’t expecting that! I have a copy of Drowning by Numbers, which I really like and must dig out sometime…
Thanks for the links too – will check out the bass solo later
November 5th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
I like this music. Glass and Nyman are probably the bigger draws for this sort of thing because they often manage to make all the slowly mutating loops sound epic or romantic. But I prefer the relative understatedness of this Reich piece. It’s not pulling faces. Less is more sometimes – like those mesmerisingly weird 60s things he did with tape loops of voices going out of sync on reel-to-reels running at slightly different speeds. Or only having percussion in ‘Drumming’.
Tried any Terry Riley? I’ve got boot sale and junk shop secondhand vinyls of ‘In C’ and ‘Rainbow In Curved Air’ (total expenditure:£6) and particularly like ‘In C’. I’d recommend it – but get the original, not the re-recording with electronic instruments. You don’t need electronic texture to make that music hypnotic. It’s all in the patterns.
I get where Mondo’s coming from with Fripp and Eno. Way back when, that was probably my way into this kind of music, along with the keyboard tape loop sections in Soft Machine’s ‘Out-Bloody-Rageous’.
Re ponciness: was it not the O’Jays who proclaimed their love of music, any kind of music just as long as it’s groovy? Ramones one day, Reich the next. It’s like brown rice and bacon sarnies. Life’s better with both.
November 6th, 2009 at 9:57 am
Hello Spud, thanks for stopping by. It’s funny that everyone usually associates Reich with Philip Glass and Michael Nyman (and I can obviously understand why), but I’ve never really listened that much to the other two. I am just taken with Steve! Like you, the understated subtlety of his work gets me everytime. There are so many ways of listening to it, but mostly I just get swept away by its hypnotic nature.
I’ve never listened to Terry Riley. Perhaps I should – I’ll keep an eye out for him.
And I recommend to you, The Necks, if you haven’t discovered them before. They’re an Australian trio who usually fall into the jazz category but their 30- 40 minute long tracks have the same building, shimmering, mind bending effect as the best of Reich’s work. And again, they are amazing live.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0uCGDCNKno&feature=related
November 8th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Hey there. Nice post. Happy Sunday. Hope you’ve been enjoying the weekend. Take care. Have a great week ahead. Cheers!
November 8th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
Thanks for this: really liking this Steve Reich stuff. Despite its unremitting percussiveness (is that a word? percussivity??), I’m finding it strangely calming.
Once again I am reminded how woefully inadequate my music collection is. Thanks to Spotify, it’s not costing me anything to do a quick crash course–there’s loads of Steve Reich on Spotify–and I’m always happy to have suggestions on how to broaden my interests, but when am I going to have time to listen to ALL THIS MUSIC??? (*looks again in post for lottery cheque/redundancy payout*)
November 9th, 2009 at 11:38 am
Hi Keith, thanks for stopping by – have a good week too.
Hoops, I hadn’t thought to look for Steve Reich on Spotify. I really have to make more use of that service… unfortunately they don’t have any Necks records, but they do have Terry Riley and Sparks… But yes, it is easy to get swamped by music. I already am. And don’t even mention all the books that I want to read!!
November 26th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Hi Cocktails,
I found this page while googling for “Mark Stewart electric counterpoint recording” – alas he seems not to have made one yet – as I thought he was brilliant in this show. And I agree with you about the Music for 18 Musicians: good as this early November show was, the one at the Barbican a few years ago was one of the greatest gigs I’ve ever seen in my life. The crowd went bananas at the end too and it was sort of sweet to see Reich and Russ Hartenberger, who has been playing Music for 18 Musicians from the very beginning, looking out in bemusement.
November 27th, 2009 at 1:01 am
Hello Venetian Red and thanks for stopping by and commenting. Yes, I think I googled ‘Mark Stewart Electric Counterpoint’ myself and found little. In fact, I got very confused because Mark Stewart (well, a Mark Stewart) was in the Pop Group and I wondered if this was the same one – sadly the evidence suggests otherwise.
The Reich season at the Barbican was fantastic. I wish they’d do it again – apart from The Cave, which I don’t know if you saw it, but just didn’t win me over in the slightest.