Think the electronica revolution is something new? Did all those UK jungle jockeys and trip-hop troubadours (or Tortoise for that matter) discover sampling, tape loops and electronic tuneage all on their own? Think again. Before Goldie Squarepusher, Massive Attack and Aphex Twin, innovators such as John Cage, the Beatles and Karlheinz Stockhausen made tape loop manipulation standard stuff. Then came Kraftwerk, Brian Eno… Public Enemy, the Dust Brothers…and Steve Reich and Mantronix. One of the original electro producers, Kurtis Mantronik got his start in the early ‘80s New York hip-hop scene, creating beats for street-smart R&B hits (by Hanson & Davis and Joyce Sims, among others) whose productions remain timeless. After releasing his own aptly named “King of the Beats” and helping introduce David Morales, Mantronik went into semi-retirement. Recently, though, he’s resurfaced with a number of notable remixes, his own time-spanning I sing the electro body album, and sampled appearances on Chemical Brothers’discs. As pervasive as Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson, Mantronik’s grooves are now a part of we call electronica. Minimalist master Steve Reich has made absorting systems music for decades. His circular melodies, gripping rhythms and efficient arrangements evoke a bracing variation on jungle’s hyperspeed rhythms and acerbic atmospheres. His earliest works- “Drumming,” Electric Counterpoint,”. “Come Out”- are abundant with loops and samples, a now-common thread electronica’s legal tender. The long history of sampled music finds some strange fruits on Reich Remixed, a project involving US and international remixers including D*Note, Coldcut, Howie B, Andrea Parker and, yes Mantronik.

Ray Gun: Both of you work outside of electronica, but you have had great influence on the genre. Is it a fad, a trend, or here to stay? Steve Reich: I think Kurtis better answer that, he has more info on that than I do.

Kurtis Mantronik: Not really. I was basically out of the scene for four or five years. I started doing rap music and then I went into dance-music-back the British termed that kind of music electro. It was done with machines. After a four-year absence, I came into the scene and now there is jungle and drum’n’bass. Listening to that stuff, I didn’t understand it. I didn’t quite like it at first because it was just…jungle was speeded up version of an old school breakbeat, extremely fast, time-compressed. And it didn’t sound funky to me. The funk element, the human side of it, was gone. It sounded artificial. Where the pocket in the normal rhythm lends itself to the accent on the snare and the kick, the groove kind of feeling you got from it. But with jungle all that stuff was gone and we got into this monotonous break over and over again. After a while I liked it, but the problem was the people who were doing it weren’t thinking of it from a musician’s point of view, just as somebody who went out and bought a sampler and sampled somebody else’s beat. And speed it up and didn’t really have anything new to add to it, just little hits and sound effects. Basically it was a giant breakbeat that just kept going. When I got into business what I liked about music was that it had a beginning, a middle and an end. It told a story. These kinds of productions, they didn’t tell the full story. Most of the jungle that I’ve heard is just one long break, like techno. Where are the vocals? Where is the breakdown? One records ends and the DJ puts another record on that sounds, to the consumer, all the same. I can’t feel it. As a musician, I am listening to what is going on and nothing is changing. The next records comes on and the people are still dancing but I am not feeling it. What am I missing here? Am I missing the drugs I need to be on? I like the advancement of sampling music but it has not fully evolved.

Reich: My take on is that I don’t know a damn thing about it. How it all happened for me was, I was in London six years ago and I was doing an interview for a pop magazine and they asked, “What do you think of the Orb?” And I said, “What is the Orb?”. They said, You don’t know “Little Fluffy Clouds?”. They gave me that and it had a piece of my “Electric Counterpoint” right in the middle of it. That was my first hint of this music. So tell me, the Orb is dance music?

RG: The Orb is dance, ambient, trip-hop, experimental…………..

Reich: Okay. I have a friend. Michael Gordon, who gave me a CD of Goldie. I wanted to hear some jungle. Then I heard that a lot of Japanese DJs were interested in my music. It was from there that Reich Remixed came to be. That all these young DJs were into my music. So now I’ve met Kurtis……I'm DJ Spooky at my house one day and he laid some CDs on me.

RG: In each of your music, rhythm is a main component.

Reich: That hasn’t changed. The old story with me is that it ain’t what you do, it’s how you do it. Until you hear it, that particular tune on the CD, then you know what you are talking about. They call me a minimalist, but who cares? I want to hear the piece. You can talk about genres, when people talk about minimalism, they talk about me, Phillip, Terry Riley, LaMonte Young, I don’t know the names to fill in or these other fields. But that is not as interesting as.

“What did you think of so-and so’s piece? “Maybe I heard a jungle guy’s album and I didn’t care for it, then I heard another of his two albums two years ago and it would have knocked me out. But I didn’t hear it.

RG: Steve, you initially got your ideas from manipulating tape loops?

Reich: “It’s Gonna Rain” was done in 1965 and then, tape was the only way to take a sound from the world and bring it into the music. You wouldn’t play it back on tape and simultaneously have the musicians play something with it. Some madman built this weird prophetic instrument called the Chamberlain organ. For those who don’t know, the Chamberlain organ is this keyboard and underneath each key is huge tape loop. In those days the loops were constantly coming off the spindles. You had to have a technician around all the time. But I thought that was a great idea. But for me, after I did the tape pieces, “It’s Gonna Rain” in ’65 and “Come Out” in ’66, I felt that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life doing tapes. I was trained as a composer, I want to do live music. How can I take this technique of changing phasing and apply this to people? At first I thought, you can’t, that is for windshield wipers on a bus bells at a railroad crossing. But I finally put a tape loop on the tape machine, recorded a piano pattern, sat down at the piano and said, “Okay, I am the second tape recorder: “So I began playing one sixteenth note ahead of the tape recorder, It’s interesting to do it ‘cause you’re totally wrapped up in just listening. That gave birth to a whole bunch of pieces and I eventually got rid of the tape decks and had people doing it. So from 1967 and “Piano Phase” up to 1988, my only use of electronics was microphones.

RG: It sounds like beat juggling, a la Coldcut or DJ Food. They use two turntables like two people playing two pianos.

Reich: Maybe that is why they took an interest in my music. Anyway, just to make a long story short, I wasn’t interested in synthesis. I don’t want something that sounds like a violin. I want a violin. But with the sampler, it was like the Chamberlain lives again. That gave birth to “Different Trains”. I think that maybe for the people on this album, the sampled pieces made it more interesting. We shared, in a different way, similar technology to produce very different results. But the sampler was also very pivotal for me doing opera. I didn’t want to do opera, but sampling was a major discovery for me.

RG: Does the computer dehumanise the recording process?

Mantronik: It’s not so much dehumanising, but tape gives you a certain saturation level and a certain fullness where digital sampling is a technology that is still evolving. It tends to sound a little cold.

Reich: I am working on a theater piece about technology in the 20th century and I was getting a kick out of it the way you were explaining it. Here is a guy playing a drum 1000 years ago. That is the natural, right? If that is the model for natural then a tape recorder is absolutely inhuman, and it gave birth to Sgt. Pepper. Now we talk about the warm humanity of tape.

Mantronik: It took a long time to perfect tape. I do like digital now. I can do things that tape can’t hold up under. It wouldn’t sound good. But the generation that is coming up now, that is their sound. So say an electronic band records an album analog, it will sound like Depeche Mode. But the generation now grew up with the electronically generated and recorded music and, subconsciously, that is what normal to them.

RG: How did you approach remixing Reich’s “Drumming” track?

Mantronik: I just followed his cues. The different tempo changes, at first I had to figure out the tempo.

Reich: One guy gets faster than the other. Mantronik: Right, then I did some things half time and just follow his cues.

RG: On the album, some let the track be the main focus, other use it as a jumping-off point, which is what you did.

Reich: I think he is at the mid-point.

Mantronik: I thought it was a nice blend of the two.

Reich: I agree.

Mantronik: What I had to deal with on his track was reverb; I didn’t get individual tracks. I thought I had a nice balance. I didn’t try to push mine ahead. And if I’m working with a vocalist, I treat the vocalist as a musical instrument. It is not one overpowering the other. It should complement.

RG: Would either of you consider changing the way you work? With Steve doing a single and Kurtis doing a longer work?

Reich: I did a piece called “Clapping Music”, which is four minutes, and one called “Nagoya” which is five minutes, so I am in single territory now. I have been there for years! (Laughs)