minimal impact /Philip Glass is crouched on his living room floor, staring at a television three feet away and suffering through Orbital's music video for The Box. The first five notes - dah-dah-dah-dah-dumm - are obviously inspired by Glass, just like the visuals, which borrow heavily from the Glass-scored film Koyaanisqatsi. After 30 seconds, Glass is losing interest, shifting his feet, turning away from the set. "It's really not very edgy, is it?" It's a cold, gray summer day, with rain pouring down the sheets, and I'm in Glass's East Village apartment, delivering a message from Orbital's Paul Hartnoll. "I wouldn't know what to say, just thanks very much," Hartnoll asked me to relate in a sincere, meaningful whisper. "It must be nice for him, to know he's influencing people who are making music now, do you know what I mean? Like if I was 30 years older, and someone who's 29 said I'd been influencing them for the past 10 years. Well, I'd be very pleased, I think." Glass doesn't look pleased at all. After Orbital, he listens to a little bit of the Orb, then µ-zig, and then Underworld - all musicians who claim him as an influence. But a listening session that started off a few minutes ago with an optimistic "Impress me!" has turned into disappointment. "I hear Glass-like music all the time," he says. "I don't care if it sounds like me - what I want to hear is something exciting."
At age 60, he's a household name: a question on Jeopardy, a cartoon in The Daily News, a cameo on The Simpsons. He's constantly working on high-profile projects, including an upcoming collaboration with Mick Jagger, a score for Martin Scorsese's Kundun and a new opera with Robert Wilson. He's as famous as a living composer can get and still be filed under "classical." With 35 CDs behind him and a full calendar ahead, Glass still performs 60 to 80 concerts a year, to an average of a thousand people a night - including at least one concert every year in London, which has always welcomed him, even when New York hasn't. Thirty years ago, Glass was driving a cab, working as a plumber and composing music in his spare time. On a good night, he'd perform to 25 people, and in a typical review, he'd see his music called "artistically limited" and "merely trivial." At the time, Glass, along with Steve Reich, Terry Riley and La Monte Young, were called minimalists; and though they all hated the label, it stuck. All four were interested in jazz, in drones, in repitition, in Eastern music. All four were interested in creating something new. By 1970, critics had begun to notice, calling one Reich concert "purely musical." But minimalism was still a downtown phenomenon, barely breaking into the uptown world of museums and concert halls. In 1973, all that changed when the Boston Symphony Orchestra brought Reich's thundering, monotonous "Four Organs" to a subscritption audience at Carnegie Hall, hoping something would happen. It did: the audience booed so loudly the musicians couldn't hear each other, and one woman rushed up the aisle, beat her head against the stage and screamed, "Stop, stop, I confess!" The minimalists had arrived.
"The situation was really a set-up," says Reich, whose music has been collected in a new 10-CD box set, Works 1965-1995 (Nonesuch). "Basically, you had a lot of blue-haired ladies coming down to see a Boston Symphonie Orchestra concert, the rest of the program being Mozart and Liszt. When they heard Four Organs, with one dominant 11th chord on four screaming Farfisa mini-compact organs for 20-odd-minutes - obviously, it's going to raise some hackles. But that's not why we're talking now. Because a lot of people did like it. That's why it's still around." At an amusement park just outside Buffalo this summer, Orbital's headlining Lollapalooza set begins with a duet of rapid-fire keyboard arpeggios (à la Glass) set slightly out of phrase (à la Reich). Like 14-year-old Lindsay Britton, who calls this Lollapalooza "the best birthday present i ever had," the crowd is mostly in their teens, waving their arms to the music, just excited to be at a real concert. They're far too young to notice the references, but Orbital's Paul Hartnoll hears Glass in his own music, "in bits and pieces, definitely"; he hears Reich too, but on "a subtler level, in that sort of counter-rhythm." As a headliner, Hartnoll isn't surprised to see that he's appealing to 14-year-olds, but he hasn't gotten used to thinking of his band as mainstream, hearing his songs played on the airplane, or in his hotel room "every time you turn the telly on." Hartnoll has been around long enough to feel old, and to hear the music changing underneath his feet. At first he didn't like hardcore techno, which to him just sounded like breakbeats and fast, squeaky voices; over time, he's seen it evolve into forms like drum'n'bass, toured with techno's Mike Paradinas, and started to enjoy it. But for Paradinas, who's recorded a couple dozen singles and CDs under the aliases µ-zig, Diesel M, Jake Slazenger, Kid Spatula and Tusken Raiders, it didn't take any time at all to come around to minimalism. "The first time I heard Philip Glass was in 1987," says the London-based musician. "I was playing in a rock band, it was over a P.A. in the hall. It was Music In Twelve Parts, Part One. And I thought, what the fuck is this? It's brilliant, and it hasn't changed for 12 minutes."
At 24, Paradinas (who prefers Glass's older organ work to his more recent orchestral pieces) is too young to remember much before the '80s - but he's significantly older than the teenagers who are just starting to record, people who "haven't even heard of Philip Glass, I can tell you that." Paradinas is a big fan of Reich, too, whose influence is there in the shifting time signatures of his Burnt Sienna. And at 38, Underworld's Rick Smith has been playing piano longer than Paradinas has been alive. He's older than Hartnoll; now, with only a fraction of Orbital's success and with a family to support, he's just grateful he can pay his bills. Smith's still recovering from a disastrous 1989, when an earlier version of Underworld lost its manager, its record company and any possibility of paying back its £80,000 debt. So when he got the chance to turn a 1990 Underworld track into a tampon commercial, he was more than happy to do it. "The marriage of art and commerce is what keeps me jumping," says Smith. "I'm being brutally honest here: you have to marry the two. I'm a working musician - that's the word, working. You have to put food in your mouth. The first Underworld record, we sold 500 copies from the back of a car. And I never imagined we'd sell as many as we did." Nowadays they're selling many thousands more, and since the soundtrack to Trainspotting included the group's Born Slippy, they're being courted by any number of American labels. But financial pressures are always there, and to relieve them, Smith listens to Reich's pulsating Music For 18 Musicians. "It's like a safe place for me," says Smith. "I put that record on when I'm under a lot of strain, which is often, and it makes me believe in something again. It has an almost deadly calm to it. It's simple in the end result, and complex in the foundations - and I think that's the template for brilliance. Blimey, I can't tell you how much it's influenced me." Smith sifts through a pile of scores until he finds Reich's 1973 work Six Pianos, a piece that he's given up practicing. He doesn't care whether or not anyone else hears the influence of Reich's technique on Underworld. "The beauty goes way beyond the technique," says Smith. "I'm not Steve Reich. I'm not interested in being Steve Reich. I'm interested in the inspiration it gives me - I could never hope to compose music as beautiful as that in my lifetime."
Steve Reich - who, like Glass, turns 60 this year - has never heard Underworld's music. He's never gone to a dance club, or had much interest in going. "Obviously not," he says, "or I would have done it." Whatever minimalism once stood for - aggressively simple arrangements unfolding over a strong, mechanical pulse - has long since evolved into something completely different. In the States, minimalism has influenced a new generation of classical composers to become the dominant voice in serious composition. But in Europe, minimalism skirted past the classical establishment, and headed straight for the pop world. In Germany in the 1970s, it found a home with avant-rock artists Can, proto-industrialists Kraftwerk, synth pioneers Tangerine Dream and producer Georgio Moroder, who figuered out how to combine those elements into disco - all of which would later have some impact on the varied manifestations of '90s electronic dance music. "There was a very explicit, very close connection between the early disco music and musicians like myself and Tangerine Dream," adds Glass. "When I first heard Donna Summer, I just laughed. I said, 'That's exactly what we're doing!' How could you miss it? And maybe it's a comment on the power of the ideas that we turned up in this revolution. We came up with a few good ideas, techniques. It's like a tool - can you imagine the first guy to have a shovel? Before he can turn around, there are shovels all over the place. That's what we were doing in the '60s, we were inventing tools. And they turned out ot be very handy."
Minimalism also came to London, where it landed on its most direct and influential conduit to ambient and techno music, Brian Eno. Eno wasn't a musician, but an art student who knew how to manipulate audio tape. After hearing Steve Reich's 1965 out-of-phase tape-piece, It's gonna rain, in the late '60s, he went back to his studio to try to duplicate Reich's experiment and ultimately came up with a closed system that improved on the original design. Reich's piece made a huge impression on Eno, creating "one of the great formative musical experiences of my life" - along with the first time he heard Philip Glass. "It was a very small room, with concrete walls, so it was really bloody loud," says Eno, remembering Glass's 1969 concert at London's Royal College of Art. "it was a dense, strong sound, and that really impressed me, the physicality of that sound. There was no attempt to draw your attention by stanndard musical devices. It was just, here is the sound. Live in it." Talking from his current residence in St. Petersburg, Russia, with the midnight sun shining outside his window, Eno pauses for a drink of water, jiggling the cubes in his glass. "A lot of people left that show," he says, "but it really bowled me over. I thought, Oh my God, this is it! This is the future of rock music!" At his cramped country home in Vermont, Reich speaks in a rush of words, sharp, insistent, impatient. He has a reputation for being difficult; he doesn't want to talk about the past. He wants to talk about the present, in which he's using samplers to manipulate the oral histories of technological disasters in Hindenburg and Bikini. But for Reich, who hasn't had the same degree of commercial success as Glass, there's always something left to prove. "It's boring for somebody to do the same thing over and over again," he says. "My hope as a composer is to make music that is just going to sweep you away into some kind of very positve, ecstatic state." That could also stand as a perfect descritption of the goals of the early rave scene.
After growing up on a diet of Eno ("I was in awe of him") and Kraftwerk, the Orb's Alex Paterson came up with a strain of beat-driven ambient music, creating "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Center of the Ultraworld" out of ocean waves, church bells and jet planes - all held together with the throbbing keyboard arpeggios of Philip Glass and gradually shifting rhythms of Steve Reich. "I remember seeing Koyaanisqatsi six times in one evening," says Paterson, who was 23 when the 1983 movie was released. The film, neither fiction nor documentary, contrasts the rapid pace of modern life (via time-lapse photography) with the static grandeur of nature. Lacking dialog entirely, its imagery is driven solely by Glass's monumental score. "I couldn't put it down, had to watch it again and again and again," says Paterson. "All my mates went out to play. They thought I was quite mad. And I just stayed inside and watched it. And watched it, and watched it, and watched it, and watched it, and watched it." Paterson is in New York for a quickly gig at the dance club Carbon. It's unfortunately the kind of night where everything goes wrong, with lightning troubles, a crowd complaining about ticket prices and the promoter ranting, "I produced Madonna! I produced Madonna!" Recovering in his hotel room the next day, Paterson sounds tired. After seven albums, he's seen a whole generation of musicians come along after him. And just the day before, the Village Voice described the Orb as "an up and coming band that's already on its way down." "I've seriously thought about packing it in this year. If you want to say we're on our way down - I mean, we've been going for nine years now," says Paterson. "To me, just to be around nine years, to be making a good, honest set of albums, I couldn't ask for a better life. We may have committed a little plagiarism here and there - but we haven't copied anyone too drastically." His influences are as clear in 1991's breakthrough Little Fluffy Clouds - a piece that Reich recognizes as his own Electronic Counterpoint - as they are in 1997's Ubiquity, which Paterson calls "a ripp-off, in a sense." There's the bubbling, pulsating keyboards (Glass); the polyrhythms of drum and metronome (Reich); the steadily shifting synth textures (Eno). At 37, Paterson has been playing long enough to hear himself imitated by younger musicians, with prettier melodies and funkier beats creeping into electronica as the music shifts from underground democracy to big business. "Way back in the '80s, we didn't expect anybody to know about us," says Paterson. "Basically, we were creating an atmosphere where the people who could dance would come to our gigs. Now we're getting more people who aren't dancing - that's called success. I never set out to make loads of money out of this business. I set out to have a really good time, and I'm having a really good time. Really, we were just out for a bit of fun. And now it's become corporate fun."
Philip Glass listens to Underworld long enough to observe, "It's a little less commercial than the other one, isn't it?" In a moment, he's making his way upstairs to his studio to look for Icct Hedral, the song he remixed with Aphex Twin, which is what he wants to play for me. Aphex Twin (Richard D. James) calls himself "a non-musician playing music. I'm a fucking twat, mucking around on my computers." Although he's worked with Glass, and is currently remixing Reich's 1971 recording of Drumming, 1972's Clapping Music and Music for 18 Musicians (for a proposed album of Reich remixes by techno artists), James doesn't notice being influenced by any of them. Growing up in Cornwall, his music of choice was the easy listening of lounge music and even Muzak (it still is). Since moving to London, he's listened to Eno, Glass and Reich, but the connection he feels is more philosophical than musical. He laughs at the idea that either Glass or Reich could be called a minimalist. James is used to performing completely alone onstage, with just "one motherfucker lap-top computer." He wasn't surprised that Glass agreed to work with him (I thought he ought to") though he felt a little nervous talking to the elder statesman of minimalism ("I get nervous talking to anyone," he confesses). James admits he learned a lot from the collaboration. "I didn't know anything about recording real intruments," he says. But mostly, he's surprised that a good tune he wrote in 25 minutes took Glass four days to remix. Coming back into the living room, Glass waves the Aphex Twin CD in his hand, slips it into the player, and adjusts the volume until the room starts to vibrate. The speakers are tiny, three little four-inch squares, but the sound is massive, monstrous. "It's nice, isn't it?" he says, shouting above the music. Eyes closed, he conducts the CD, nodding his head, waving his hands. He taps his toes, strokes his chin, hums the melody. "Listen here," he says, as the flute makes its entrance, and then the strings, building into a defeating crescendo. "Now, that's an interesting piece," he says when it's all over. "Powerful, eh?" In another minute, he's looking sad again, genuinely disappointed that he liked it so much more than anything I'd played for him. We could keep going, but it's getting late. A telephone call means that his dinner appointment is waiting. Before I go, I pass on of the rest of my messages. Eno sends his regards, while µ-zig's Mike Paradinas has an inevitable question for the master: "Do you want to work with me?"
/ By Kenny Berkowitz.
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