Slowed Phase (Conjunto Tipico Sensacion)[disquiet0249] by 337is (three three seven is)

I love Minimalism in all forms. It's been an omnipresent force throughout my entire life. The American branch of musical Minimalism, with the trinity of Adams, Glass, and Reich probably does make up my own personal liturgy. As I dug deeper into the that vein and discovered the forerunners like Riley, Young, and next generation contributors like Bryars and Nyman, the world of Minimal music kept expanding. Ironic.

So, Reich is one of my favorites and I know his music intimately. I knew exactly what I wanted to do in this Junto; sort of a mashup between his percussive pieces like "Music for Pieces of Wood," and "Drumming," and something rooted in his phase works like Piano of Violin Phase. For my source material I selected a portion of this field recording that I gathered in Peru:

https://soundcloud.com/337is/conjunto-tipico-sensacion?in=337is/sets/field-recordings

I then set out to create a basic loop which took longer than I anticipated. Once I had the basic loop, I copied it multiple times and rendered it as a new file. I then took two instances of that file and adjusted the playback speed of the second iteration to be slightly slower than the first. I could definitely hear phasing, but it wasn't as precise as Reich's work and I was disappointed in the results. So I turned to slowing things down a lot. When I did that, the phase relationship was almost completely obscured. I can still hear a bit of the phasing in the syrupy pings and whirls of the radically pitched down material. I'm pretty unsatisfied with this as a piece of music related to Reich, but am reasonably soothed with it as simply a piece of music.

Doing this Junto revealed to me how much I don't know about my DAWs. I tried to do this in both Ableton and Reaper and struggled mightily to free the individual tracks from the project's root tempo. It seems like the software is explicitly designed to mesh everything into compatible rhythms. It was hard to free them from the tyranny of tempo.

More on this 249th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Wish the minimalist composer Steve Reich a happy birthday” — at:

http://disquiet.com/0249/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

http://llllllll.co/t/happy-birthday-steve-reich-disquiet-junto-project-0249/

There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.