This CD is a collection of remixes of old Reich recordings by leading artists from the more thoughtful end of the popular dance world. A remix is where one artist takes a recording made by someone else and basically rearranges it using the full power of the recording studio rather than an orchestra, typically to make it easier to dance to or to tie it into the latest dance music fashion. Overall, though, it doesn’t work. None of the remixers, despite their avowed reverence and knowledge of Reich’s work, seems able to get inside his music to reveal anything new. Too many of them seem entranced by Reich’s glittering timbres, using brief, obvious samples of these enchanting surfaces as a backdrop to their own preferred beats, ignoring the deeper and lengthier processes that harbour the musicality.
Ken Ishii’s take on Come Out provides an exception. Out-takes from the original are laid out on eminently palatable and suitably spacious rhythms and synthesizer chords. Chopped out of context, these fragments retain their punch and are even augmented when placed within a more traditional musical frame; the emotional impact of the piece is revealed as deriving at least as much from the emotionally charged original source material and the twisting phasing effects as the sound of the process itself. Contrast this with the attempt by D*Note at Piano Phase, where the loss of the slowly unfurling phasing process renders Reich’s intentions nothing more that an attractive-sounding musical nonsense.
This disc will undoubtedly bring new listeners to Steve Reich and does have considerable musical worth. The paradox is that virtually none of this has anything to do with Reich’s original ideas.'