Steve Reich — It's Gonna Rain — phase-shifting tape composition

1965

Artists: Steve Reich · Year: 1965 · Medium: Tape composition — identical recordings played on two tape machines, gradually drifting out of phase · Substrate: Two tape machines playing identical recordings of a Pentecostal preacher's sermon; machines' slight speed differences produced gradual phase-shifting across the composition's seventeen-minute duration · Place: San Francisco, California, USA · Institution: San Francisco Tape Music Center (affiliate) In January 1965 Steve Reich, working in a one-room San Francisco apartment on two identical Wollensak reel-to-reel tape machines, set up two loops of the same recording — a fragment of a Black Pentecostal street preacher shouting the words "it's gonna rain" — on the two decks and let them play. They began in unison. Because the motors of the two Wollensaks were mechanically identical but not digitally synchronized, one loop drifted, over the course of several minutes, slightly ahead of the other. A canon emerged. Then a dense, phased cloud of beats. Then, much later, the loops returned to near-unison and the cycle began again. Reich did not design this. He set it up and listened. What he heard, and what he recognized, was that the drift itself was the composition. The phasing relationship between the two loops — continuously shifting, never repeating, governed by nothing more than the small inequalities between two motors — was producing a musical structure he could not have scored by hand. He described the experience later as "the process I discovered, not invented." It's Gonna Rain, edited down to about seventeen minutes for release, is the work. This matters to this archive because it is a rare moment when an artist heard, with absolute clarity, what a machine was doing on its own, and refused to edit it out. Every subsequent Reich piece — Come Out (1966), Piano Phase (1967), Drumming (1970–71), the long ensemble works from Music for 18 Musicians forward — applies the same procedure, sometimes with tape, sometimes with pianos, sometimes with tuned marimbas. The human performer, in the ensemble works, becomes the drifting motor. Process is the subject. Terry Riley had arrived at something adjacent in 1964 with In C, but Reich's phasing was a more specific discovery: two identical systems, run in parallel, produce emergent structure through small asynchronies. That is also the description of almost every interesting generative-art algorithm in this archive. It's Gonna Rain is one of the clean early cases of the idea stated in its own domain. Lore Reich had recorded the preacher — a man known only as Brother Walter — in Union Square, San Francisco, in late 1964, using a portable reel-to-reel. The "it's gonna rain" fragment was about three seconds long. When Reich spliced two identical copies into loops and played them on the two Wollensaks, he sat on his apartment floor with headphones for nearly an hour, realizing in real time that the accidental drift was more musically interesting than anything he could have composed. He later said it was the single most important afternoon of his career. The Wollensaks were mechanical; Reich kept them for years. He played them for John Cage, who reportedly listened in silence and then said, "Well, you've found it." Sources • Reich, Steve — "Music as a Gradual Process" (1968), in Writings on Music 1965–2000 (Oxford, 2002). • Schwarz, K. Robert — Minimalists (Phaidon, 1996). • Paul Sacher Foundation — Steve Reich Collection.