1. Reich Different Trains Electric Counterpoint Rar Online
2. Reich Different Trains Electric Counterpoint Rar 1
3. Steve Reich Electric Counterpoint

Steve Reich - Different Trains / Electric Counterpoint (1989) FLAC Peter Gregson - Mari (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (2019) Hi-Res Colin Currie & Steve Reich - Live at Fondation Louis Vuitton (2019) Hi-Res. View credits, reviews, tracks and shop for the 1989 CD release of 'Different Trains / Electric Counterpoint' on Discogs. From The Album 'Drumming / Music For Mallet Instruments, Voices And Organ / Six Pianos ' 1974 info: http://www.discogs.com/Steve-Reich-Steve-Reich-And-Musicians-Drumming-Six-Pianos-Music-For.

I’m not usually one for big statements in music. If albums try to do too much I find they get bogged down and lose sense of what should be their main purpose: musicality. So, Different Trains, which sees SteveReich at his most ambitious, pulling out all stops to compose a complex exposition that details the breadth and suffering of the second world war’s incessant tragedies, shouldn’t work for me. Then why does it?

The three passages of Different Trains are distinct enough to stand on their own, each detailing a distinct aspect and period of the war, but also becoming immensely richer in the tapestry of the wider composition. In essence, the music here is built around a select variety of short vocal samples, lifted from what appears to be a significant variety of interviews across different periods. The string and other arrangements are composed with the sole purpose of complementing the tone of each individual sample, which, although odd, works to deepen the emotion and helps craft a unique atmosphere around each individual loop. There’s a very honest feel about the way the stories are presented, the distinct decision to remove the more specific context working in favour of the composition, preventing it from becoming overly dense. There’s a deft awareness exhibited by Reich regarding the balance and harmony of spoken-word storytelling against the importance of the creation of melody. It’s also very easy to picture some sort of visual accompaniment to the music, perhaps in the form of splices of short documentary material: trains going back and forth, archival interviews, tired landscape shots, grainy war footage and so forth. This footage would naturally loop alongside the music, over and over, haunting, hammering home the bleakness of the narratives to be etched into minds forever.

Where popular media and entertainment’s portrayals of historical events, particularly in war, often fail, is in the capturing of subtlety and nuance of narratives. Instead creators may opt for over-dramatisation over accuracy or fall victim to inherent bias. What Reich does well to handle this, is to immediately acknowledge his distance from the centre of the atrocities by placing himself and subsequently part of the composition’s broader story in the distant land of America. While this might sound selfish or purposeless, it actually helps to personalise the record’s thematic story and offers a unique humanistic viewpoint into the time period from an outsider. Reich’s own reflections on his train journeys across the northern continent lead to a humbling self-realisation of incredible fortune, given his family background of Jewish descent. As Reich explained himself: he could easily have been travelling on very different trains at the time.

The piece immediately opens with a recurring group of oddly catchy string arrangements which are quickly joined by the sounds of travelling trains. The way that the horns from the trains are manipulated to create a sort of melody is astounding and exceptionally powerful. The vocal tracks of America, Before the War detail the journey of simple passengers to-and-fro across the continent, personally evoking memories of Reich’s own experiences. The sense of progression is constantly in the foreground, ’1939, 1940, 1941 I think it must have been,’ chugging along, for better or worse. In contrast to the first composition, there is an immediate transition in feel and atmosphere upon the beginning of Europe, During The War. Instantly, the music becomes slower, starker and more drawn out. The familiar train horns from the first piece are replaced with siren-like sounds with acute focus, signalling immediate danger and fear. It’s an abrupt teleportation into a completely different landscape from America, Before the War, a transition from simplicity and routine into a very real, tangible sense of dread and loss. There are hints of personal narrative that appear, fragments of a larger story, “I was in second grade,” tangled with urgency, “he said don’t breathe / into the cattle wagon.” The real importance, however, is of the collective anguish of the storytellers, the sharing of the struggle between them. Listening too intently sees whistles and high pitched noises merge into piercing screams. At times it’s too much to bear.

In the third segment, Reich constructs a complex piece that is hard to grasp at first listen. It’s a combination of the prior movements, interjecting dialogue from both Americans and Europeans. Every time the piece seems to sound hopeful or relieving, the mood quickly returns to sombreness. As a woman sighs, “the war is over,” another immediately retorts, ‘are you sure?.’ The repetition of the ‘From New York to Los Angeles’ loop from America, Before the War transforms into something quietly beautiful with the addition of a short, bright violin phrase that helps to reinforce the tender, tentative change. Overall the passage is a solemn reminder that even after the cloud of war is lifted for some, the impacts of the destruction can still linger for others, the roots of violence intertwined in family history for years to come. The final coda is stark and eerie, a girl’s wavering song conveying images of an overlay of mist that surrounds the unpredictable future to come.

Hearing the more comfortable rise into the beginning of Electric Counterpoint immediately after thus comes as quite a shock and a necessarily comforting relief from the chilling end to Different Trains. The piece is significantly less dense and utilises less musical elements in its composition. The focus is now placed on guitar melody instead of orchestral backdrops, having been commissioned for a single musician. Nevertheless, the beginning of the piece is immediately recognisable as Reich with its repeating undulations that rise and fall like natural waves. The first key moment is when the guitar moves away from the repetitive rhythm just after the two minute mark, becoming distinct, almost as if it’s learnt some kind of independence. Here, two guitar tracks play a short relaxing phrase, each offset from the other, essentially filling in the gaps of the other. Later, more guitar layers enter with prominent roles in the mix, building upon the same melody, again in a slightly different way, before the original rippling pattern returns for an early highlight.

II. Slow continues promptly with a transition into a quieter, more reflective passage that makes use of the same electric guitar backbone. Its merits come from the effective exploration of space and genuinely uplifting guitar playing that infectiously seeps through. III. Fast introduces bass lines and acoustic chord playing to round things off for a climactic finish. The song’s infamous key change at the 2:10 mark is fun and unexpected, if not a little overhyped. The composition finishes strongly, with the same familiar guitar melody, expectedly comforting and organically easing into a silent fade out.

Reich’s decision to pair the two vastly different compositions onto the same album is certainly odd, as apart from sharing some elements of traditional minimalist composition, they couldn’t be more different in tone, structure and purpose. However, when considered separately, or even listening to them in their order on the record, their merit cannot be denied. Different Trains remains one of the most moving and aspiring pieces of music I’ve ever come across. Every time I listen, I find myself completely enamoured and awestruck by some new cello note or whistle or vocal loop that somehow I’d previously missed. Electric Counterpoint similarly grows and evolves every time I let the soft, purposeful melodies entrance me into a tranquil state, washed over by the elegant playing. Superlatives fail to describe just how important I find the two compositions, Reich and the musicians behind the recordings to be. Masterful.

Reich Different Trains Electric Counterpoint Rar Online

Graham Reid | | 3 min read

The 1965 recording It's Gonna Rain by the New York composer Steve Reich was one of the most interesting, innovative and important pieces of its era.

At least for Reich.

In San Francisco, Reich had heard a streetcorner preacher Brother Walter in apocalyptic mode warning of another Great Flood to wipe out sinners, and Reich recorded him.

As with Dylan's Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, Reich heard in the words “it's gonna rain” a more metaphorical message and slicing the tape on those few words he looped the parts in different tape players, and cued them up.

The idea was that “it's gonna” would come from one machine and “rain” from the other.

However when he played them back one machine ran slightly faster than the other and so they increasingly went out of synch to create pure, rhythm-driven sound.

The minimalist element was always appealing but here now was a 17-minute piece – with doubled and doubled again overlays, there's an edited three minute sample here – which morphed into something different with an almost self-generating rhythmic and melodic mind of its own.

And so Reich was away and into more tape experiments, increasingly coupling them with real instruments and music of his own creation.

It's Gonna Rain and other Reich pieces from the period (Come Out, Clapping Music and Piano Phase) appeared on the Nonesuch album Early Works in 1987.

Which brings us rather neatly to this Nonesuch album from two years later and its game of two halves: Different Trains is tape loops and recorded sounds with the Kronos Quartet, the second side Electric Counterpoint is layering, looping and editing of guitar parts by Pat Metheny.

The front and back photos of the album cover neatly parallel each other.

If Reich's work could be filed under “minimalism” alongside Philip Glass, there is a clear if loose distinction to be made between the two: Reich was exploring rhythmic pulses and repetition (which led to more melodic work), Glass explored melodic minimalism which created the rhythm.

Or something like that.

Different Trains and Electric Counterpoint were composed and recorded in the late Eighties (Electric Counterpoint a commission by the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival for Metheny).

As Reich tells it in the liner notes, Different Trains – commissioned for the Kronos Quartet with pre-recorded tapes of Holocaust survivors, train sounds and voices reminiscing about train journeys – was prompted by him as a child travelling on trains between his mother's home in LA and his father's in New York.

Those journeys happened during the first years of World War II and Reich reflected on how, as a Jew, had he lived in Europe at that time he would have been on very different trains.

The piece is in three parts: America, Before the War; Europe, During the War and After the War.

There is an extraordinary tension here due to the taut repetition of the string quartet passages and the howling of train sounds which sound like sirens of alarm in the first two movements.

And during the final section, snatches of survivors voices are cut into a piece which is no less tense through the reminiscences (“There was one girl who had a beautiful voice”) and the snippet of an old Pullman porter talking about the trains (“but today, they're all gone”) is freighted with meaning.

With strings echoing speech patterns and the clacking of the tracks, Different Trains remains a remarkable and moving piece.

Electric Counterpoint is also in three sections (fast, slow, fast) and is a studio construction where Pat Metheny pre-recorded multiple guitars and electric basses (it isn't a wall of sound however) for a piece which rides gentle, repetitious pulses and overlapping melodies where keys and rhythms change very subtly.

There are some lovely melodic passages here – notably in the second section – which those familiar with Durutti Column, Penguin Cafe Orchestra and certain, reined-in music by Robert Fripp would feel very much at home with.

So the album is a game of two very different halves.

Over the decades Steve Reich has written for percussion ensembles, choral groups, string quartets and orchestras. He has written operas (notably The Cave) and had his music remixed and sampled.

But this album, starting with the more approachable Electric Counterpoint, is a useful entry point into that vast body of work.

And the piece Different Trains is emotionally white-knuckle in places.

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Reich Different Trains Electric Counterpoint Rar 1

There are other Steve Reich albums reviewed at Elsewhere starting here and he is interviewed here.

You can hear the original Kronos/Metheny album at Spotify here

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Steve Reich Electric Counterpoint

Elsewhere occasionally revisits albums -- classics sometimes, but more often oddities or overlooked albums by major artists -- and you can find a number of them starting here

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Here is Different Trains in a recent live recording with the London Contemporary Orchestra