Steve Reich Quotes

He told me things about himself that should have made him sound urbane but did the opposite. He told me, for example, that he liked Steve Reich's music, modern-art museums, and Beat poetry. These words flew out of his mouth and went boomeranging back as if they knew they weren't meant to take the conversation anywhere but back to him. He also explained that he really liked interacting with different kinds of people. When I didn't immediately respond to this, he repeated it, and so I assured him I believed it.

The flat was large and airy, sparsely furnished with sleek, modern pieces; no walls separated living spaces, except the bedroom. Vintage posters advertising the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Grand Prix de Monaco decorated the walls. There was a picture of Steve McQueen, leaning against his famous Ford Mustang, and another of Carroll Shelby, the legendary American automaker going face-to-face with Enzo Ferrari, his even more legendary Italian counterpart.

MALONE: Well, on the treatment front, the Merck and Pfizer drugs are really fairly toxic and not particularly effective. That will come out publicly. The deadly nature of remdesivir will become more and more clear. The safety and effectiveness of the early treatment strategies that Drs. Tony Urso, Ryan Cole, and Peter McCullough and everybody have been promoting will become clearer. So it will become clearer that there were unnecessary deaths due to suppression of early treatment. As for the vaccines, because the Pfizer data package will continue to roll out and continue to be nitpicked, you’ll learn more and more about the various malfeasance that’s occurred. There will be increasing awareness of the reproductive risks and the coagulopathy, stroke, blood clotting, autoimmune disease, and this kind of chronic malaise of the post-vaccinated. Those risks will be known to a greater extent. I think that there’ll be increased awareness of the damage to immune systems and the dangerous consequences of that.

It’s a combination of the pseudouridine incorporating into the RNA and the toxicity of the lipids and the toxicity of the complexes as a whole, which is separate from the toxicity of the spike. So, we’ve really got three categories of toxicities. We got the payload toxicity—that’s your spike issues. We got the cationic lipid and associated nanoplex toxicity. And we have the toxicity of the pseudouridine incorporating molecule, which is not really a natural RNA; it’s something else altogether.

I’m increasingly focused on what has been done under the guise of COVID by the World Economic Forum and its acolytes, and the logic of transhumanism and human modification. I think that if I have my way about it, that’s gonna become much more a part of the national dialogue. And there’ll be a growing awareness of the intentional infiltration of the Western democracies by the World Economic Forum, specifically its young leaders trainee program. The narrative, I think, is gonna turn more along the lines of COVID being a gross overreaction. And seeing that increasingly now, as people are talking about the overly pessimistic projections of morbidity and mortality that drove global policy and national policy information is going to become more and more common knowledge—that the stress scenarios were grossly overstated, and that threat scenario was weaponized for a variety of purposes that had nothing to do with public health.

Soon after that, Eno briefly joined a group called the Scratch Orchestra, led by the late British avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew. There was one Cardew piece that would be a formative experience for Eno—a piece known as “Paragraph 7,” part of a larger Cardew masterwork called The Great Learning. Explaining “Paragraph 7” could easily take up a book of its own. “Paragraph 7”’s score is designed to be performed by a group of singers, and it can be done by anyone, trained or untrained. The words are from a text by Confucius, broken up into 24 short chunks, each of which has a number. There are only a few simple rules. The number tells the singer how many times to repeat that chunk of text; an additional number tells each singer how many times to repeat it loudly or softly. Each singer chooses a note with which to sing each chunk—any note—with the caveats to not hit the same note twice in a row, and to try to match notes with a note sung by someone else in the group. Each note is held “for the length of a breath,” and each singer goes through the text at his own pace. Despite the seeming vagueness of the score’s few instructions, the piece sounds very similar—and very beautiful—each time it is performed. It starts out in discord, but rapidly and predictably resolves into a tranquil pool of sound. “Paragraph 7,” and 1960s tape loop pieces like Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain,” sparked Eno’s fascination with music that wasn’t obsessively organized from the start, but instead grew and mutated in intriguing ways from a limited set of initial constraints. “Paragraph 7” also reinforced Eno’s interest in music compositions that seemed to have the capacity to regulate themselves; the idea of a self-regulating system was at the very heart of cybernetics. Another appealing facet of “Paragraph 7” for Eno was that it was both process and product—an elegant and endlessly beguiling process that yielded a lush, calming result. Some of Cage’s pieces, and other process-driven pieces by other avant-gardists, embraced process to the point of extreme fetishism, and the resulting product could be jarring or painful to listen to. “Paragraph 7,” meanwhile, was easier on the ears—a shimmering cloud of sonics. In an essay titled “Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts,” published in Studio International in 1976, a 28-year-old Eno connected his interest in “Paragraph 7” to his interest in cybernetics. He attempted to analyze how the design of the score’s few instructions naturally reduced the “variety” of possible inputs, leading to a remarkably consistent output. In the essay, Eno also wrote about algorithms—a cutting-edge concept for an electronic-music composer to be writing about, in an era when typewriters, not computers, were still en vogue. (In 1976, on the other side of the Atlantic, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were busy building a primitive personal computer in a garage that they called the Apple I.) Eno also talked about the related concept of a “heuristic,” using managerial-cybernetics champion Stafford Beer’s definition. “To use Beer’s example: If you wish to tell someone how to reach the top of a mountain that is shrouded in mist, the heuristic ‘keep going up’ will get him there,” Eno wrote. Eno connected Beer’s concept of a “heuristic” to music. Brecht’s Fluxus scores, for instance, could be described as heuristics.

I'm gonna die and think, 'Ugh, I was just getting started.