Poster for a performance of Steve Reich's Drumming

TI has developed a romantic fascination for the NY art world of the early 70's. That is if you can think of the high-industrial as romantic. Soho was a wasteland of abandoned warehouses freshly occupied by starving artists. Idealism and iconoclastic ambition was in the air. Art that was not just the art of the object was a fresh frontier, whether in the form of performance, installation or pure conceptual expression. Titans of our times like Laurie Anderson, Carl Andre and Cindy Sherman were starting to make a name for themselves. Everything from back then feels grainy, monochramatic and in equal parts, melodramatic. And back then minimalism was new and it was sweeping, even surfacing as a vibrant new strain of American music. Phillip Glass is perhaps the most totemic of the minamlist composers but recently I've been listening to tons of Steve Reich. A lot of his explorations have gone mainstream. In fact there is a brilliant remix album of some of Reich's landmark music such as "Music for 18 Musicians" and "Drumming" featuring the reworkings of Coldcut and Mantronik (all hail!). The inspiring thing about the "Early Works" LP is the innocence implicit in this thought that a young composer like Reich could rethink the principles behind what makes American music...American. And minimalism is a very American, very New York aesthetic that makes sense in a Mondrianian city of grids, perpetual noise and rectalinear skyscrapers. Steve Reich's music is the visual equivalent of this. I have a couple of interesting design commissons looming for 2008 and this is the music that will be looping in the background. Check out this 1984 poster for a performance of Reich's "Drumming. Isn't it genius the way the type degrades as your eye travels upwards. I'm saving that idea for something, somewhere. Music as design. We live for it!