Steve Reich: the ECM years, boxed and still in phase
Three albums Reich made for a jazz label between 1978 and 1982, gathered for his 90th birthday. The running order makes the argument, and it holds.
BY JOLT Staff · OCT 12 2026 · 3 min readThe ECM Recordings gathers the albums Steve Reich made for ECM between 1978 and 1982, Music for 18 Musicians, the Octet record and Tehillim, and puts them in order for his 90th birthday. Inside is exactly those three, plus an essay by Paul Griffiths and Reich's original liner notes. The order is the case the box is making.
Reich came out of New York, born in 1936, philosophy at Cornell, composition at Juilliard and then at Mills College with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud. By the mid-sixties he was feeding tape loops through machines: It's Gonna Rain in 1965, Come Out in 1966. Phasing, one figure running a fraction ahead of another, came from hearing those loops spool out of sync, and it stayed with him. Drumming in 1971 and Music for 18 Musicians in 1976 are that idea at full size, both landmarks of minimalism and, later, part of how rock and electronic music learned to repeat themselves.
“a new era”
He reached ECM with Music for 18 Musicians already recorded. The premiere had been at New York's Town Hall in March 1976, the tape was made in Paris by engineers from Deutsche Grammophon, and ECM released it in April 1978. It sold a hundred thousand copies in less than a year, on a label that until then was mostly known for jazz. Manfred Eicher, who had left the Berlin Philharmonic to work as a recording assistant at Deutsche Grammophon, produced the second album himself.
Music for 18 Musicians is the weight in the set. It runs 56:31, and it takes the shapes of the tape years and slows the harmony underneath them, so a figure repeats long enough that you stop hearing a pattern and start hearing players hand it around the room. Each line has a job and a place. Nothing hurries. It is also far and away the longest thing here, and the reason the box exists.
The second record is Eicher's, three works he produced himself: Music for a Large Ensemble, Violin Phase and Octet. Close miking and electronic reverberation give each voice its own weight in the room, and that separation is the closest this music comes to the sheen of a great pop record. Violin Phase is the outlier: one instrument's title in a box of crowds, and the plainest statement of the technique the whole set is built on. Octet is where the ensemble writing thickens, every player carrying a line that only holds because the others are carrying theirs.
Tehillim closes it, and Paul Griffiths' essay calls it the birth of a new era. By the end of that decade Reich's music had taken on historical themes and themes from his Jewish heritage, Different Trains arriving in 1988, and the third ECM album is where you can hear the pull start: same pulse, different target.
This set is for the listener who plays Music for 18 Musicians front to back and treats the room as part of the record, and for the ones who came to Reich sideways, through the electronic and rock records that borrowed his repetitions. Arvo Pärt is the name usually set beside him. The patience is shared. The pulse is not, and the pulse is Reich's. Whoever owns the three albums already owns almost all of this.
The flaw is the shape of it. Music for 18 Musicians outweighs everything around it, and the middle record, three works in under fifty minutes, sits between two statements like a survey. The box's own contribution is modest: the Griffiths essay and the original notes. Nothing here argues for itself beyond the music, and the music does not need the help.
So the score is a 4.5, and the packaging is not the reason. Music for 18 Musicians alone would earn most of it, and the two records after it are why the number holds: the same pulse, pushed from process toward something with a subject. Sixty years after It's Gonna Rain, that pulse is still the most persuasive thing in the room.
