You may, or more likely won't, be able to see from these illustrations that this new recording of classic Reich scores, mostly from the '70s, is released on Nonesuch?

A brickbat for designer John Gall who has the CD number printed near-invisibly on the end panels of the inset card and threby rates a place in our article on inset booklets and the sins of their designers...

To save yourselves (& me) time, do follow that Amazon link, which carries useful reviews of this (for me) redundant re-cycling of familiar Reich territory, by expert Steve Reich afficionados [- - a lack of critical rhythmic interest with static mildly dissonant harmonic content combines for an unrewarding listen that seems to go on for longer than the 14 minutes it actually lasts. - - ].

If you're a Reich fan, you probably have already the Triple Quartet, in which the Kronos play live, overdubbing two pre-recorded versions of the music...*

The overdubbed electric guitar piece sounds, frankly, horrible. The Music for Large Ensemble has gone back to the original score, a form in which it had never been recorded. Orchestral musicians reduced to soulless automatons.

The Japanese MIDI marimba percussionist uses MIDI/KAT technology and overdubbing for the Tokyo/Vermont piece, to "shorten the natural duration of the notes so they do not overlap" and muddy the results as on previous efforts with marimbas and xylophones...

To put in context this theoretical music, composed without consideration for red-blooded live players, I found myself wondering whether the same team might not try recording Bach's The Art of Fugue, arguably never intended for live performance, in a form freed from human contamination?

Peter Grahame Woolf

* q.v. Reich's Triple Quartet given live by three student string quartets at Trinity College of Music [Editor]

http://www.musicalpointers.co.uk/articles/CD_InsertBooklets.html