It’s fascinating now to consider how the rip-it-up-and-start-again philosophy ushered in by punk chimed with the minimalist strategies of the American avant-garde.

While Eno knew all about Reich, Glass and Kraftwerk, you can rest assured that over in Jamaica, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and King Tubby were none the wiser. That didn’t stop them coming up with techniques of radical subtraction equally, if not more, inspired than their American and European contemporaries. Like Eno, these visionary producers treated their studio mixing desks as instruments and deployed all kinds of painstaking tape-loop effects to create “dub” versions of vocal reggae tracks. Dub was minimalism in action: it was all about space, and the interaction of small sonic elements, with tracks reduced to their essence of drums and seismic bass, and additional sounds looped and phased and echoed around them ad infinitum.

The first flash of punk, with its three-chord imperative, was a kind of minimalism, but it wasn’t until the post-punk years that Britain’s guitar-slinging youth grasped the idea of “closely detailed listening” and minimalism proper. It’s fascinating now to consider how the rip-it-up-and-start-again philosophy ushered in by punk chimed with the minimalist strategies of the American avant-garde. Bands like Wire, Throbbing Gristle and particularly Joy Division (aided by the cavernous, dub-savvy production of Martin Hannett), made music that was sparse and spatially aware. A few years later, taking inspiration from both Kraftwerk and post-punk essentialism, the likes of Cabaret Voltaire, The Human League and John Foxx would create their own brand of stark, minimalist electro-pop.

Dub had proven that the dancefloor, rather than the concert hall, was the environment where minimalism could create the most impact. Back in New York, DJs Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan were intuitively alive to the power of repetition in music, and they used tape reels and multiple copies of records to extend the hooks and rhythmic breaks of songs, inducing trance and frenzy in their rapt dancers. Producers such as Walter Gibbons and Francois K began to make club-ready extended edits of tracks that bore the unmistakeable fingerprint of dub. Arthur Russell, as au fait with the “high” minimalism of Glass and Reich as he was with disco and dub, created a series of stripped-down works, ranging from exuberant club jams like ‘Go Bang’  to the deeply melancholic, bare bones cello-and-voice recordings of World of Echo. Perhaps the most futuristic work of minimalism to emerge from the disco sphere, though, was Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s evergreen ‘I Feel Love’. Presaging techno, the extended mix of this track was trance-pop minimalism writ large, a seemingly endless aural vista of ecstatic pulsation and iteration.

Dub had proven that the dancefloor, rather than the concert hall, was the environment where minimalism could create the most impact.

The rave era, and the quantum leaps forward in affordable music-making technology that came with it, would yield yet another generation of DIY minimalists. The original acid house records were stripped to the bone, and the very basis of house and techno music – repetitive bass and drums – was definitively minimalist. However, after the “second summer of love” dance music became newly preoccupied with big vocals, old-fashioned musicality, undue fuss.

It didn’t take long for some producers and listeners to revolt; doubtless partly inspired by the heightened psycho-acoustic sensitivity induced by ecstasy, there was a craving amid the underground for more stripped-down, delicate and detailed sounds. In the UK, ambient house and techno swelled up to meet this demand. The Orb’s 1990 hit ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ sampled Steve Reich’s ‘Electric Counterpoint’, highlighting the consonance between the minimalism of then and the electronic head music of the present day. Richard D. James, AKA Aphex Twin, had already shown an affinity with the phasing and pulsation of “classic” minimalism in his sensational Selected Ambient Works 85-92 album, but its sequel, Selected Ambient Works Volume II (1994),  took things to a whole new level of poise and tonal sophistication. Critics were quick to compare James to Reich and Glass, and, though he claimed he had never heard of them, by 1995 he had collaborated with Glass on ‘Icct Hedral’ and remixed the New Yorker’s  “Heroes” symphony, itself based on the album by David Bowie and Brian Eno. The lineage and legacy of minimalism was more visible than ever.

Over in Detroit, techno producer Robert Hood was making music that was rigorously simple but not in the least bit ambient. His tough, opaquely funky “minimal techno” sound had been brewing for some time, but it was most famously showcased on the 1994 release Minimal Nation.

“We’re stripping down and realizing that we need to focus on what’s essential in our lives.” – Robert Hood

“I was fooling around with a Juno 2 keyboard and I came across this chord sound,” Hood later explained. “Once I had that chord sound and a particular pattern I realized I didn’t need anything else. In order to maximise the feeling of the music, sometimes we have to subtract.”

Not merely concerned with what worked on the dancefloor, Hood believed in minimalism as a natural response to the clutter and distraction of modern life. “Minimalism is not going to stop,” he said, “Because it’s a direct reflection of the way the world is going. We’re stripping down and realizing that we need to focus on what’s essential in our lives.”

At this time, producers like Richie Hawtin and Dan Bell were making comparibly terse and taut tracks, but it was the Berlin-based duo of Moritz Von Oswald and Mark Ernestus, AKA Basic Channel, who took electronic minimalism that little bit deeper – inspired by the aesthetics of Jamaican dub they created a propulsive, immersive techno sound-world unlike any that had come before. Come the noughties, in the wake of Hood and Basic Channel, not to mention Pan Sonic, Wolfgang Voigt, Jan Jelinek and Pole ,”minimal” would be the catch-all term for the sound of modern house and techno, with the aptly named M-nus and Kompakt labels leading the way.

“Minimal” has now fallen out of fashion as a genre, but as an idea and practice it heartily persists. Grime was minimalist, by default as much as by design; dubstep is minimalist, foregrounding bass and percussion in a way that would please Reich as much as Tubby. Ricardo Villalobos is currently at work re-interpreting music from ECM, the minimalist label that first released Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians. Minimalism isn’t going away; in fact, it’s never been away, it’s always been there, at the heart of music -  it simply took visionaries like Terry Riley and Steve Reich to  isolate, define and draw attention to it. Thanks to them, we all now know that music’s most enduring pleasures and mysteries occur at the micro, and not just the macro, level.

Kiran Sande
This article originally appeared in The Daily Note, the official newspaper of the Red Bull Music Academy

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