John Adams: The Chairman Dances

Radio 3’s favourite minimalist for a long while. I saw Nixon In China a long time ago, and I don’t recall any special dancing when this was playing.

Nils Frahm: Says

Nils Frahm was born many years after Riley, Glass and Reich popularised Minimalism. It was probably just another influence on him. Says is a wonderful piece of music. Headphones, sit back and let it do its thing.

Steve Reich: Music for Eighteen Musicians

One of Steve Reich’s top five best sellers. For a long time it could only be performed by his own ensemble, because the notation was incomprehensible to anyone who hadn’t played in the ensemble. I saw the first performance by another band at the Queen Elizabeth Hall many, many years now. The appetiser was a piece by Terry Fernyhough, which is somewhere else you can miss without missing anything.

Philip Glass: Glassworks

While we’re talking about Minimalism, let’s mention Philip Glass and this album, which everyone who saw Koyaanisatski rushed out and bought the following Saturday.

Terry Riley: In C

Ah, but maybe you have never heard Terry Riley’s In C. My generation did, because John Peel would play it on his Saturday afternoon show, between Principal Edwards Magic Theatre (don’t go there) and Captain Beefheart. In C was the first Minimalist piece to become famous. Every other minimalist owes their bank accounts to In C and Terry Riley.

Simon Ten Holt: Canto Ostinato

Hans Beekhuysen mentioned this in one of his videos and I threw caution to the wind and ordered it from Amazon. It rested a while before I played it, and when I did, I was very pleased. It’s melodic, rhythmic and repeating in the best manner of Minimalism. Give it a listen above and you’ll either run away because you don’t like Minimalism, or you’ll think it’s kinda like Terry Riley, but it lasts longer.

The Pond on Christmas Day

Three-fifteen on Christmas Day. There was a lot of water on the ground from the rain. I'm not sure that there is supposed to be a pond on that little corner of my Air Park, but there was then and still is now.

Kingston-Upon-Thames

Kingston-upon-Thames. I was there early one Saturday morning in the middle of January and with that grey sky, it looked and felt like somewhere in the Midlands, or perhaps Yorkshire. That's just not a southern English bridge.

It was extensively re-developed by Town Planners in the 1980s and 90's, and those guys had the architectural taste of, well, local council town planners. In contrast the riverside development at Richmond is at least an attempt to do vernacular. (Vernacular in Richmond is quite posh, of course.) Kingston is busy, and it has a lot of the shops you want, and a John Lewis, but it was not designed to look pleasant on the outside. It was not designed to be a place.

It looks like someone bombed it flat and then private developers were allowed to dump whatever they wanted wherever they wanted, with no obligation to create a public space with character.

But it could have been the grey sky. I drove back via Hampton Court, and everything felt like I was two hundred miles north of the Thames.