Minimalism
The 9 Best Minimalism
Tracks of All Time
American composers from the mid-sixties who replaced development with repetition and let a simple process run until it produced something nobody wrote. The idea underneath every loop-based record this site publishes.
- Origin
- New York and San Francisco, 1964
- Also known as
- minimal music, systems music, process music, phase music
- Tracks
- 9
- Updated
- 2026-08-29
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Number 1: Terry Riley / In C
1968 · Columbia Masterworks
Fifty-three fragments, any number of players, each moving on when they feel like it. Riley wrote a set of instructions rather than a piece, and produced the founding document of the whole method.
Number 2: Steve Reich / Music for 18 Musicians
1978 · ECM
An hour of pulsing marimbas and breath-length harmonic cycles. The most seductive thing minimalism produced, and the record that made the argument to people with no patience for the argument.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Number 3: Steve Reich / Come Out
1966 · Odyssey
One phrase from a Harlem riot testimony, looped on two tapes drifting out of sync until the words dissolve into rhythm. Devastating, and the origin of phasing as a compositional device.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Number 4: Alvin Lucier / I Am Sitting in a Room
1969
A man records himself describing what he is about to do, then re-records the recording forty times until the room's resonance eats the speech. The purest process piece ever made.
Number 5: Tony Conrad with Faust / From the Side of Man and Womankind
1973 · Caroline
New York drone meets a German rock band and neither blinks. The single clearest piece of evidence that minimalism and krautrock were two halves of the same argument about repetition.
Number 6: Pauline Oliveros / Bye Bye Butterfly
1965
Two oscillators, tape delay and a Puccini record, assembled live in one pass. Oliveros was building the vocabulary of electronic music while being left out of most accounts of who built it.
Number 7: Julius Eastman / Stay On It
1973
A minimalism with groove, gospel and a nervous breakdown in it. Eastman wrote the piece the school needed and was written out of it for decades; the score survived on a single tape.
Number 8: Gavin Bryars / The Sinking of the Titanic
1975 · Obscure
A hymn the band supposedly kept playing as the ship went down, looped and slowly drowned in reverb. Released on Eno's own label, three years before he named ambient music.
Number 9: Philip Glass / Opening
1982 · CBS
Glass at his most approachable: a single arpeggiated figure with the accents moved just enough to keep the ear off balance. Six minutes that have been imitated for forty years.