#Steve Reich

[jgthirlwell]

05.04.24 Rebekah Heller plays Steve Reich’s Grand Street Counterpoint (the street both she and Steve live on!), for solo bassoon and 10 pre-recorded bassoons, based on Reich’s Cello Counterpoint from the early aughts. For the Long Play festival, at BRIC.

[davidhudson]

Happy 88th, Steve Reich.

Freehand Watermark Tracing #4, 1978.

[thekingofgear]

Thom's Heavily Modified Tele (Tele3) Reappears in the hands of Noah Yorke

Two photos by Baxter Adams of Noah Yorke with the guitar at the Shacklewell Arms on January 21, 2023 (ny.wav). Thanks to Andrew for bringing this post to our attention!

In late-2022 and early-2023, Noah Yorke used a heavily modified Fender Telecaster for performances with the band Hex Girlfriend. The guitar is the very same Telecaster that Noah's father, Thom, used with the band Radiohead during their OK Computer tour in 1997-1998. Thom played it on more aggressive tracks from that era such as Electioneering and The Trickster.

Although Thom only used the guitar as a backup on tour in early-2000s, the instrument went through some further mods — most notably a refinish with a thin black paint. It looks as though Thom subsequently carved some words and peace signs into the paint, including the word "black" beside the control plate.

After Radiohead's 2004 tour, the guitar went unseen for a decade. It next appeared at a London Contemporary Orchestra concert in Budapest in 2015, when Jonny used it to play Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint. Since then, the guitar once again disappeared for nearly a decade. Though the guitar may also be the "black tele" listed in Jonny's recording notes for Electric Counterpoint in June 2014 (vine).

Hex Girlfriend has shared photos from two shows where the guitar is visible: first at Sebright Arms on Nov 6, 2022, and later at the Shacklewell Arms on Jan 21, 2023. The guitar is also visible in what appears to be a rehearsal photo in Dec 2022, likely meant to promote the then-upcoming Shacklewell arms show. It can be seen in footage from two more shows as well: footage from a show in at MOTH Club on July 22, 2023, and footage from from a show at The Moon on The Moon on Oct 22, 2023. The guitar is now covered in stickers, including a "ram's head" sticker from Electro-Harmonix.

Left: a photo by Estie Joy of Noah Yorke with the guitar at the Sebright Arms on November 6, 2022 (ny.wav). Right: a photo, likely from a rehearsal, showing the guitar (ny.wav).

The guitar still has the simple wiring that Thom favored in the 90s, with the tone control removed and replaced by a relocated output jack. The original select switch seems to have been replaced by a smaller toggle switch. Also note that the neck humbucker has the screws on the "bridge" side, rather than the traditional orientation with the screws on the "neck" side. This is just cosmetic, the orientation makes no difference in sound (you'd need to adjust the wiring or the magnet to actually reverse the phase).

Left: a shot of Thom with the guitar at the Hammerstein Ballroom on Dec 19, 1997, pointing to a fan just before the band played Electioneering (youtube). Right: a photo of Jonny playing the guitar at a solo show with the London Contemporary Orchestra in Budapest on Oct 17, 2015.

Note the wear (cigarette burns?) on the guitar's Strat-style neck, particularly between the nut and the first fret. The burns are present even in the earliest photos of the guitar, when it still had a single coil bridge pickup.

One can only wonder what transformations the guitar will go through before it appears again (presumably in another decade)!

[fuchinobe]

(1989, Elektra Nonesuch, 9 79176-1) Later sampled by The Orb in Little Fluffy Clouds (1990)

[danielgianfranceschi]

Meredith Monk

[flipchild]

actually 1966. My bad

[steamedtangerine]

Pendulum Music - Sonic Youth

This is a rendition of a composition written by minimalist/experimental composer Steve Reich in 1968. It is made by suspending a number of microphones directly above amps which they're plugged into, then swinging the mics so that they move in a pendulum motion, and recording the feedback that occurs.

[earhartsease]

thinking back to the days of cassette transfers from LPs and how we bought a C120 cassette so we could fit all of Steve Reich's Music For 18 Musicians on one side of it, and spent half an hour doing syncing nonsense so one side of the LP sort of seamlessly continued into the second side as it's one piece that's just over an hour long (and on the LP they fade out at the end of side A and fade in on side B) - and our grandmother's little fridge had a faulty suppressor, so the cassette recording had crackles on it at certain points

and as soon as we were able to get the CD of it we did and have been listening to that ever since, but we still feel the absence of the fridge crackles in the exact points where they interacted with the music, and it's got to be something over 30 years now since we heard that tape but we were listening to it daily for nearly 20 years before that so yeah old friends

[mochamartyr]

i made a cool and awesome video about portal 2’s soundtrack!! you should watch it NOW

[the-problemattic]

saturday, 13/07/2024

[davidhudson]

Happy 87th, Steve Reich.

[thekingofgear]

Jonny's Fender Acoustic

This photo of Jonny playing a Fender dreadnought acoustic was taken by his son Tamir.

To help publicize their upcoming Steve Reich Festival, The Hallé recently shared this photo of Jonny playing a Fender dreadnought acoustic guitar. Jonny will be playing Reich's Electric Counterpoint on the third (and final) day of the festival.

Back in November 2012, Jonny answered fan and celebrity questions in an article for Uncut magazine. Nicolas Gauna from Buenos Aires asked Jonny about his first guitar and the first song he learned, and this was Jonny's reply:

I bought a Fender acoustic for £40 from a “for sale” column in the Oxford Journal when l was about 14, then an electric one from my teacher when l was 16. I still have the acoustic, but the electric one was stolen in Leeds on the first Radiohead tour (at the Duchess Of York, I think… it was a cream Telecaster if anyone's seen it). I don't remember working out many songs by other bands - maybe “Psycho Killer" by Talking Heads. There was a tiny guitar room at school where teenagers hung out playing each other U2 songs - but I never had any U2 records.

Given Jonny's penchant for stickers during his younger days, one can only assume that this is the same guitar that he played when he first strummed his way through Psycho Killer.

Based on the quote, the guitar was purchased in around ~1985, and was already used by that point. Fender had released their California series acoustics in 1983, but they were still relatively new and expensive. So it's more likely that the guitar is from Fender's standard F-series. Price lists show that the F-series was available from Fender through the 70s and 80s. The headstock confirms this: California series guitars have a Stratocaster-style headstock, whereas Jonny's has a more traditional acoustic headstock with the distinctive F-series notch in the center. In addition, we can see a square "Fender" label through the soundhole. A cursory glance through Fender F acoustics shows that the square label was used in the 70s and early-80s, particularly on Japanese-made instruments. They seem to have switched to a round label in the late-80s. This gives further evidence that the guitar in the picture really is Jonny's original acoustic.

Fender's acoustic and classical guitar offerings in April, 1977 (guitar-compare.com). Given the price Jonny paid for a used instrument, it seems very possible that he bought a 1970s F-35 model. The more expensive models like the F-65 had fancier inlays and details, whereas the one in the photo has simple dot inlays on the fingerboard.

[thingsmybfsaid]

[He got Sam Reich and Steve Reich confused]

[mikrokosmos]

Alexandre Desplat - Main Theme to Asteroid City (2023)

Last night I went out to the movies with friends and we saw the new Wes Anderson picture, Asteroid City. This is the first time in a long time that I've seen a film in a theater and I do have a lot to say about the movie and the unique way that it shows the kind of crisis and anxiety that artists have in the creative process. But from the first moment I fell in love with the score by the acclaimed film composer Alexandre Desplat. Just as Anderson uses picturesque scenes and stock characters of Atomic-Age Americana to evoke a nostalgia for this idealized past we can only experience as artificial recreations, So Desplat turn to post-war American music to capture not only an atmosphere of the era but also of the American Sublime. There are only a few moments that his score comes through mixed with retro country western tracks. The opening of this “suite” holds us with a high-pitched note held over a melody in the lower register of the piano. This distinct “Americana” sound feels that way because it is reminiscent of Copland’s orchestral writing. But then the oscillating xylophone and bells brings in a pulse that makes me think of American minimalism with the likes of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Little wind arpeggios come in to heavily emphasize Philip Glass' style of “minimalism”, which can be heard throughout his scores. And this nod to Glass ends with a long held organ pedal point in the bass, reminding us of his iconic score for Koyaanisqatsi (1982). Then, unexpectedly, the held note which opened the score is revealed to be the opening to the serene and otherworldly prelude to Wagner’s Lohengrin (or at least a short pastiche). Why reference Wagner here? I'm going to guess that this is related to the Wagnerian sound of heroism, triumph, and the sublime all being paired with the reminiscent love for the cowboys of the Old West. And these long held notes, and evoking the repetitive and potentially endless sounds of looping American minimalism come together to create a musical depiction of the American Sublime of endless Horizons and expansive nature and the quiet beauty that places like the Southwest has. I might be reading a lot into it and I don't want to argue that this is what Alexander Desplat had in mind when he decided to write in an American musical style for matching aesthetics, but I think this adds a nice little cherry of a detail on top of an already complicated and multi-layered film.