The 9 best Minimalism tracks of all time
Minimalism
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.
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Terry Riley / In C
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.
Steve Reich / Music for 18 Musicians
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.
Steve Reich / Come Out
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.
Alvin Lucier / I Am Sitting in a Room
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.
Tony Conrad with Faust / From the Side of Man and Womankind
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.
Pauline Oliveros / Bye Bye Butterfly
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.
Julius Eastman / Stay On It
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.
Gavin Bryars / The Sinking of the Titanic
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.
Philip Glass / Opening
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.