Published
Mon, Sep 29, 2014, 10:01
- Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood features on the influential American composer's new album, which is set for release this week.
A new album from Steve Reich, Radio Rewrite, is slated for release this week.
Reich is known as a minimalist, but his work—most notably Music For 18 Musicians (1976), The Desert Music (1983) and Different Trains (1988)—is as musically and emotionally rich as anything to come out of the 20th century classical canon. His work is often written for atypical ensembles or instruments that don't normally feature on classical stages.
The titular piece of Reich's newest album draws on two tracks by Radiohead, "Everything In Its Right Place" and "Jigsaw Falling Into Pieces," which the composer became interested in after meeting the band's guitarist, Jonny Greenwood, at a festival in Krakow. "It was not my intention to make anything like ‘variations’ on these songs," Reich says, "but rather to draw on their harmonies and sometimes melodic fragments and work them into my own piece. As to actually hearing the original songs, the truth is—sometimes you hear them and sometimes you don’t." Greenwood appears on the album, which opens with a recording of him playing Reich's 1987 piece "Electric Counterpoint." Pianist Vicky Chow can also be heard here playing "Piano Counterpoint."
Tracklist
01. Electric Counterpoint: I. Fast
02. Electric Counterpoint: II. Slow
03. Electric Counterpoint: III. Fast
04. Piano Counterpoint
05. Radio Rewrite: I. Fast
06. Radio Rewrite: II. Slow
07. Radio Rewrite: III. Fast
08. Radio Rewrite: IV. Slow
09. Radio Rewrite: V. Fast
Nonesuch will release Radio Rewrite on September 30th, 2014.