Onstage at PopTech just now, Brian Eno said that a musical piece by Steven Reich had a huge influence on how he thought about art. He said that Reich's piece showed him that:

1. You don't need much.
2. The composer's role is to set up a system and then let it go.
3. The true composer is actually in the listener's brain.

I'd never heard of Reich, but the name sounded familiar when Eno mentioned it. I realized I'd seen it yesterday when reading about Cory Arcangel's show at Team Gallery in reference to his piece, Sweet 16:

Cory applied American avant-garde composer Steven Reich's concept of phasing to the guitar intro of Guns and Roses' track Sweet Child O'Mine. Rather than use instruments, Cory took the same two clips from the song's music video and shortened one clip by a single note. As the videos loop, the two intros grow farther apart until they are back in sync.

He's veered away from video games, but Cory's new work is looking really interesting these days.

This entry is part of the kottke.org weblog, of which An entire year is the latest entry.

Within this weblog, this entry belongs in the Ants, chaos, and cities, Art, Music, Poptech 2006, Rip, mix, burn, Technology categories and was published in October 2006.

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