by Ben Hogwood

“It was, I have to say, one of the three to four really life-changing musical events of my life” – Brian Eno on hearing Steve Reich‘s It’s Gonna Rain for the first time (from Steve Reich: Conversations)

Background

Reich’s recording of preacher Brother Walter was made in Union Square, San Francisco, in 1964. The preacher was referring to Noah’s Flood, and the forty days of continuous rain in the Bible, but the contemporary significance – with the Cuban missile crisis gripping the Western world – gripped the composer.

Once recorded, Reich took to the studio, and with two recordings of the preacher playing side by side, he observed during playback how one tape was slowly going out of phase with the other. The resultant sounds were bringing some extraordinary effects to the speech and its resultant melody and rhythm, which Reich honed in on for the final edited tape piece.

The piece is effectively in two movements – the first hones in on the words “It’s Gonna Rain”, looping them relentlessly, while the second takes on snippets of the scene in the ark: “But Noah couldn’t open the door; it had been sealed by the hand of God!”

Thoughts

Nothing quite prepares you for your first encounter with Brother Walter. The impassioned message is powerful enough, given extra perspective by the street sounds, but when it starts to go through Reich’s phrasing process all sorts of weird and wonderful musical tricks are created.

The baton is quickly passed to the listener, and the ear zooms in on unexpected micro details, with fragments of words and music taking on new effects and meanings. On headphones the effect is overwhelming; on a home stereo it is still incredibly powerful. My two live encounters with this piece have generated a headache through the overstimulation!

What Reich is also doing here, unexpectedly, is preparing the way for rap music. Brother Walter’s speech is so melodic, and so rhythmic, that it creates a profile all of its own, a dance only enlivened by the phased repetitions.

The stereo picture shifts, an unsettling experience but also a wholly stimulating one. The melodic properties of the speech of “It’s Gonna Rain” hit home in a kind of microtone key, between D and E flat major. When the two tapes reach the maximum distance apart the effect is that of an aural eclipse, with intense kinetic energy generated at the expense of all other noise.

With the second part we know a little more what to expect, but here the effect is that of a sonic whirlpool. As Reich’s process works through the manic intensity grows, the perspective of the voice changing as it gets chewed up by the machine. The vortex takes hold so that halfway through the words inaudible, and then the effect – to this listener at least – becomes that of a sonic plane coming into land, the pitch of the tape sinking towards the ground before disappearing slowly into the distance. A quite extraordinary piece!

Quotes / Legacy

Brian Eno again, from Conversations… “Everything I thought I understood about music needed to be revised. It had a very, very big impact on me. it really set me thinking again about what music could be, and what the act of listening consisted of, because it made me realise that listening was a very creative activity”

Recordings

Just the one – part of the 1987 collection Early Works (Nonesuch)

Also written / released in 1965: John Coltrane A Love Supreme; John Barry Thunderball

Next up: Come Out (1966)

Published post no.3,045 – Monday 12 October 2026