Two turn signals at a red light drift out of sync, spiral through chaotic syncopation, and snap back into unison. That hypnotic mechanical drift is the key to understanding Steve Reich, the philosophy major and jazz drummer who revolutionized modern music by exposing the hidden processes of sound itself. This episode follows Reich from a bicoastal childhood of cross-country train rides, through a Cornell thesis on Wittgenstein and a rejection of the 12-tone establishment at Juilliard and Mills College, to the San Francisco experimental scene where he helped premiere Terry Riley's In C.

We break down the 1960s tape pieces built from a Pentecostal street preacher and Daniel Hamm of the Harlem Six, the terrifying leap of asking human players to phase in Piano Phase and Violin Phase, and the trips to Ghana and into Balinese gamelan that produce ...