Jonny Greenwood plays Electric Counterpoint on Reich's Radio Rewrite album

Steve Reich's album Radio Rewrite is out on Nonesuch today in the US, and on 6 October in Britain. Its title piece, which Reich built from two Radiohead songs, “Everything In Its Right Place” and “Jigsaw Falling Into Place”, gets its first recording from Alarm Will Sound, for whom it was co-commissioned, conducted by Alan Pierson. On the same disc Jonny Greenwood plays Reich's Electric Counterpoint.

That is the piece that brought Reich to Radiohead. He heard Greenwood play it at Sacrum Profanum, a festival of Reich's music in Krakow, in September 2011, liked it very much and listened to the band when he got home. Two of their songs stuck. Electric Counterpoint, written for Pat Metheny in 1987, sets one guitarist playing live against up to ten recorded guitars and two bass parts. Greenwood has played it many times since Krakow, including at the Barbican in London in a tribute to Nonesuch's 50th year.

The London Sinfonietta gave the first performance of Radio Rewrite at the Royal Festival Hall in March 2013, and Alarm Will Sound played it at BAM's Harvey Theater in Brooklyn on 13 September.

Reich says he did not set out to write variations on the songs, only to draw on their harmonies and the odd scrap of melody. Being a composer who works with musical notation I chose to reference two songs from the rock group Radiohead for an ensemble of musicians playing non-rock instruments¹, he says, and sometimes the songs can be heard in the piece and sometimes they can't.

Tracklist