Its too bad he doesn’t. Riley’s compositions are tedious, boring, repetitive, more machine-like than human in their feeling of pre-programmed determinacy. The moment depicted in the photograph is the worst-case scenario of a feeling familiar whenever Reich first opens a piece: we are no longer free, we are locked in to the inevitable predictable inescapable banality of repeating loops, each passage as if another Groundhog Day after Groundhog Day after Groundhog Day. But who would want to listen to recurring loops of Ground Zero Day Ground Zero Day Ground Zero Day? The image and Reich’s composition style promise to freeze us in that terrible feeling and moment forever.

Perhaps those directly bereft of loved ones from this horrible event want or need some literal remembrance, but personally I would expect the need for healing and to make life for the living would drive audiences towards more post-911 perspectives, with some musical feeling of rebirth or rebuilding or recovery and something more human on the cover to carry us along in that process. I wonder if Steve Reich has ever tried painting? Surely his paintings would sound better than his quartets, and for those above who actually like his music, the need for a more palatable CD cover seems the consensus.

Unfortunately, the gestalt of the picture/title suggests – no, propagates – exactly what the terrorists want to get across, i.e., mass subjugation. It reflects a paucity of imagination (not to mention taste) in depicting the human dimension of the atrocity. (What about the street view? the shoes? The rescuers? The survivors?) Showing the plane, the billowing smoke, the giant architecture — all that disaster kitsch just amplifies the sickly heroic nature of what the perpetrators did (heroic in their eyes only).

The negative reaction when Christian Carey first put up this post, particularly on Twitter from within the New York musical community, led me to post a defense/apologia on my blog:

http://www.afoolintheforest.com/2011/07/deep-dark-truthful-mirror.html

At least in light of the disappearance of record stores and, most recently, the closing of Borders, there’s not much worry of seeing row upon row of these covers in a window display or end cap.

One thing I’d point out is that, in the pop world, artwork is routinely debuted on a website prior to a CD’s release. Nonesuch is a label that releases both classical and pop CDs. So, this isn’t that unusual a practice for them.

They asked Sequenza 21 to release the artwork instead of, say, Pitchfork or Stereogum, because our readership is more likely to be interested in a new Steve Reich CD than the average Pitchfork reader.

Now, whether the art is “in good taste” or not is certainly up to debate and I’m glad we’re discussing that here in the comments. My one suggestion: if you hear the piece, which is very disturbing and visceral, you might view the cover differently. Does the cover make me uncomfortable? Yes. But then, so does Reich’s piece.
So do Different Trains and Come Out. Relevant artwork, topical artwork, is risky; sometimes it makes us uncomfortable. But like Reich’s aforementioned earlier works, I think that WTC 9/11 has something meaningful to say.

https://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/SteveReichMusic

Really bad form.

But Armondo since you can’t be all things to all people this has to be finessed. Pissing the right people off can create controversy which oddly can be great for sales. We are providing publicity even as we speak. As I remember the theory is there is no bad publicity.