Steve Reich, "Music for 18 Musicians" - FULL PERFORMANCE with eighth blackbird

If you like a bit of weird time signature, arpeggios, and seemingly dissonant sounds that eventually harmonize into chaotic outburst you might enjoy what was my coding metronome back in the early 1980s ... YMMV - Steve Reich, Music for 18 Musicians ▶ this video

Little Fluffy Clouds was inspired by and famously used samples from minimalist composer Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint (among others). I think this is about where they sampled it from link then sped it up for BPM and equalized out the bass frequencies Reich apparently was so happy with it when he heard it he told his record company not to sue the Orb. Reich is one of my favorite composers and is a somewhat unexpected "uncle" to the electronic music revolution. Upon reflection it's not entirely surprising with long repetitive rhythmic passages that are somehow absolutely electrifying. Once you hear his work you realize that his influence is all over modern music. link ▶ this video

Steve Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians" marks out an hour with bars, it served as a metronome for the odd lengthy project or three in the past: ▶ this video

> people talking/singing in a language I even partially understand to be highly disruptive That's readily addressed: Luritja: link Djambarrpuynu: link Kuanua: link If you're looking for patterned music to keep the world at bay you might look to composers like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Wim Mertens, etc. eg: Music for 18 Musicians - Steve Reich ▶ this video

[tangent] Speaking of Steve Reich, if you haven't yet listened to his glorious Music for 18 Musicians ensemble piece (duration: 55 minutes), do give it[1] a try. An explanation of the composition and its structure: link link [1] ▶ this video [/tangent]

For me, the only genre that reliably works is "minimal" music, like stuff by Steve Reich[1] or Gas[2]. My definition of this genre would be music with no lyrics that has highly repetitive structures (differentiating it from "ambient" music, which I find too sleepy to be invigorating). [1]: Music for 18 Musicians ▶ this video [2]: Koenigsforst link

This is an incredibly beautiful tutorial. Art, deconstruction, minimalism and some of the greatest musical artists of the 20th century! What an amazing way to explore the mechanics and mechanisms behind these artists. I had heard of other minimalist artists before, but until a couple years ago somehow had missed Reich. I'm now an addict, especially to his later pieces when he really started growing his work into larger and larger themes. "Music for 18 Musicians" has become one of my favorite pieces of music of all time. I say this as somebody who finds a great deal of modern art fairly deplorable -- the first time I heard some of Reich's pieces I stayed up the entire night finding everything of his I could put into my ears. Reich has a nack for finding incredibly beautiful and urgent patterns and sounds and exploring them to a kind of amazing fullness. I never had the pleasure to play any of this pieces when I was attempting to become a musician, I understand that the practice for a piece can take months to a year because of the difficulties of maintaining your part of the phase. Listening to his music is, to me, a very intense activity, because I desperately want to notice when the music starts changing and because of the phasing it never does. There's certain parts of the phasing to that I find particularly enjoyable, but I've also found that you can't just jump to them, you have to encounter them in the context of the phases that come before and after. Once you get quite f