Without Steve Reich, modern music would sound very different. Electronica might not exist at all, nor might anything containing samples and The Orb would have had to think up their own tune for Fluffy Little Clouds rather than help themselves to one that was already lying around.
For anyone unfamiliar with Reich's work (where have you been?), this single-cum-sampler is the perfect place to start. Featuring three of his best known works remixed by modern masters of the genre he created, it's an excellent introduction and an all-too-brief taster of the five-disc retrospective due out on September 25.
Glaswegian experimentalist Alex Smoke tackles 1996's Proverb while Four Tet manages to add a remarkable amount of his own personality to the sublime 1987 work Drumming, all wrapped up in a package completed by Ruoho Ruotsi's Pulse Section Dub Remix of 1976’s seminal Music for 18 Musicians, a reworking which first appeared on the original Reich: Remixed, in 1999.
The result is delicate, beautiful, genuinely genre-defining and better than anything else you'll find out there this month. In mad, sad, doomed dreams, this single would be number one forever. If only.
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