`This is not my album; it has my name on it, but it's not my music; it's theirs." Steve Reich has to have a new piece for the Kronos Quartet ready by next month, and the small matter of two of the three acts of his latest video opera, Three Tales, yet to be written for its scheduled premiere in 2001. But he still took time off from composing for a whistle-stop week around Europe to promote a disc of what he is quick to emphasise is really nothing to do with him - though he clearly takes a certain pride and satisfaction in the fact that the album exists at all. Reich: Remixed is a collection of 10 DJ mixes, based upon Reich's own recordings of his music, and issued this week by his record company Nonesuch.
It's a global compilation; the majority of the tracks originated in Britain, but others come from the USA, Germany and Japan. They draw upon the full spectrum of Reich's development as a composer, from the pioneering tape-loop pieces of the mid-1960s, Come Out and It's Gonna Rain, through the minimalist masterpieces of the 1970s like Drumming and Music For 18 Musicians, right up to City Lights for chamber orchestra and sampling keyboards in 1994. The opening Megamix could be Reich's greatest hits compressed into a single track, with the most minimal of minimalist Clapping Music overlaid on the cool guitar playing of Pat Metheny in Electric Counterpoint, and pieces like Proverb, Six Marimbas, and Drumming added to the recipe too. The rest select just a few pieces or even one work: DJ Spooky bases his on City Life; others concentrate single-mindedly on Come Out or Proverb.
The final playlist was chosen - "by committee", Reich says - from a selection of around 30. He withheld permission for certain works to be used - those with the most explicit personal or religious content, like the string quartet Different Trains, the magical vocal Tehillim and the biblical video opera The Cave - and held a power of veto over the final selection, though, he says, he was overruled in one particular case. Some tracks he likes more than others - "Coldcut has to live with that, DJ Spooky has to live with that, but I don't" - though he is particularly fond of the Megamix: "There's a polytonal moment, when Electric Counter- point comes in another key, that sounds just like Charles Ives."
For Reich, it's the idea of the project rather than the final result that gives him pleasure, the sense of poetic justice, of a wheel coming full circle. A generation that wasn't even born when he started experimenting with his tape-loops is rediscovering his early music and realising how much the techniques that DJs now take as common currency owe to his pioneering efforts, learning from the past just as Reich himself as a teenager used to go to Birdland, New York's most famous jazz club, "in the section where they don't serve alcohol", and listen to Miles Davis and Kenny Clarke. Later, when he was a student at the Juilliard School, he heard John Coltrane there too. The wheel started to turn in 1974, he remembers. "We were doing a concert in the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, and a young guy with long hair and lipstick comes up to me afterwards and introduces himself as Brian Eno.
"Then a couple of years later David Bowie turns up at the Berlin premiere of my Music For Eighteen Musicians. I listen to Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and 15 years later, Eno and Bowie are listening to me."
He thinks that his influence upon Bowie emerges most strongly in the Low album, while Eno's collaboration with David Byrne of Talking Heads on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts owes something to those early tape-loops - "though it's a limited thing. Eno is an artist in his own right and immediately turned it to his own purposes".
Laurie Anderson's O Superman suggests she had heard those pieces, too, but Reich's adoption by the 1990s' club culture is a different thing altogether. "Eight years ago, I was being interviewed by a journalist from one of those electric keyboard magazines and he asked me what I thought of The Orb. I said `What's that?' He was amazed, and gave me a copy of their CD, and I find a 30-second section of Electric Counterpoint embedded in one of their best-known numbers.
"So I was aware that all this was going on, though I think that if I hadn't gone and started using sampling in Different Trains none of it would ever have happened. "The DJs are mostly interested in the early pieces, but I think if the word hadn't gone back that I was using sampling back in the late 1980s and continuously ever since, there wouldn't now be the interest there is.
"This new album is a much more just way of doing something - I'm getting royalties here on something I don't deserve to get. Now the cards are stacked in my direction. In a monetary sense, they're now doing something for me.
"I'm very proud that I've been an influence on the likes of Louis Andriessen, John Adams, Michael Nyman and Michael Gordon. Now here comes another feeling, of being useful to musicians from the other side of the fence. "But given my history, it makes perfect sense. To these kids here there's no competition and it's easier to be gracious than it was for people like Eno who were so much closer to my own generation. It's a kind of vote of confidence, it makes me feel very good."