Steve Reich – It’s gonna rain NOW

Steve Reich, born in 1936 is known for his minimalistic music which he developed in the mid to late 1960s.

It’s gonna rain starts with some vocals, with apparently no background music which are hard to understand as they do seem to have a strong accent. The first words that are really clear are “it’s gonna rain” and for the whole duration of the piece, these will be the words burned into the listeners brain. The phrase is constantly repeated, cut at different parts, looped around, never ending repetition of just three words. When people say they wanna hear those three words, it for sure is not “it’s gonna rain”.

At one point of the piece, there is a second voice tract added to the first one, which does repeat the phrase as well, so there is not really a new element put onto the already existing part but rather the same one or one really similar, almost like a canon. What the new tract does, is blurring the outlines of the words, so it becomes harder to understand what the vocalist was saying.

There seems to be a second part to it, so after the first part there is a short break and then the same process of constant repetition is done again with the other part of the exclamation one could hear at the very beginning of the piece. Here again additional tracts of the same loop are added, changing the lyrics to more of a cacophony than a conversation.

It continues to become more noisy, while I was unable to even understand one word at one point, even though I’ve heard the lyrics so many times at the end of the song. It sounded almost like a white noise machine, which does produce that static sound that drowns everything else out, just like Reich’s piece does at the end.

The title “it’s gonna rain” is therefore very fitting. At the beginning there are single drops, hitting a surface and as the rain picks up, those become more and more, overlapping, making it harder to single out each drop by itself. Towards the end it is a full on rainstorm, which do sound a lot like white noise to me, too. You are not really able to hear each single drop but rain can be just as noisy as the piece is, overshadowing other sounds as well.