The contemporary music group
BL!NDMAN has a unique configuration; the original ensemble diverged into sax, strings, and drums subgroups that perform separately and sometimes, as here, reassemble. Given some of the experimentalism that
BL!NDMAN has offered, in the past, an album of works by
Steve Reich,
Philip Glass, and
Terry Riley may seem unusually mainstream; these American minimalists are pretty much canonic by now, even on the group's European home ground. There are a few wrinkles.
BL!NDMAN adds electronics to several pieces, notably
Terry Riley's
Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band. However, even that work originally involved tape loops and really all that
BL!NDMAN has done here is to update those for the 21st century, looping being a classic example of a case where musical needs preceded technological solutions. In many other cases, the works here left the instrumentation open, and
BL!NDMAN's realizations are as valid as any others. (The composers are, after all, still alive and can raise objections if they so choose.) The performances catch to a T the precise sectional evolutions that
Glass specified and that are implicit in
Reich's phase shifting. The group properly moves to a more acoustic setting for
Riley's
In C, a work more thoroughly shaped by non-Western ideas than those of
Glass or
Reich. An added bonus of the fresh realizations of these composers here is that those who have come to minimalism from electronic dance music, which was influenced by minimalism in the first place, will find much of interest here. An important step in the development of the minimalist tradition. ~ James Manheim