Come Out (Reich)

Come Out is a 1966 tape piece by the American composer Steve Reich.

Civil rights activist Truman J. Nelson asked Reich to create a piece using recordings of voices for a benefit for the Harlem Six; Come Out was a byproduct of the collage's production. The Harlem Six were six black youths arrested for a murder of Margit Sugar, a Hungarian refugee, in Harlem in the weeks following the Little Fruit Stand Riot of 1964. Nelson agreed to give Reich creative freedom with the tapes. Come Out was constructed entirely from a loop of four seconds taken from the more than 70 hours of tapes Nelson presented.

Reich used the voice of Daniel Hamm, one of those involved in the riots but not responsible for the murder; he was nineteen at the time of the recording. At the beginning of the piece, he says, "I had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them", alluding to how he had punctured a bruise on his own body to convince police who had beaten him to allow him to receive medical aid. This marked the first time that a member of the Five-Percent Nation appeared on a published recording.

The full statement is heard three times. Next, Reich re-recorded the fragment "come out to show them" on two channels, which initially play in unison. They quickly slip out of sync to produce a phasing effect, which Reich had first used in his 1965 tape piece It's Gonna Rain and would later apply in acoustic works such as Piano Phase (1967). Gradually, the discrepancy widens and becomes an echo and, later, almost a canon. The two voices then split into four, looped continuously, and then eight, until the words are unintelligible. The listener is left with only the rhythmic and tonal patterns of the spoken words. Reich says in the liner notes of his album Early Works of using recorded speech as source material that "by not altering its pitch or timbre, one keeps the original emotional power that speech has while intensifying its melody and meaning through repetition and rhythm." The piece is an example of process music.

In 1967, Come Out was released on LP by Odyssey Records alongside electronic works by Richard Maxfield (Night Music) and Reich's former San Francisco Tape Music Center associate Pauline Oliveros (I of IV).

Come Out was one of several works by Reich used by the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker as part of Fase (1982), which became a cornerstone of contemporary dance.

The piece was remixed by the Japanese DJ Ken Ishii for the 1999 album Reich Remixed.