It’s rare to find an album that completely rewrites your understanding of what music can or should sound like. Music for Eighteen Musicians was just such an album for me. After hearing it frequently mentioned as an influence on the burgeoning post-rock scene and modern electronic music, I finally bought a copy (Nonesuch Records’s 1998 version, to be precise), pressed “Play” on the CD player, and was forever changed.

Music for Eighteen Musicians sounds incredibly familiar, due no doubt to all of the artists that it’s influenced over the decades, and yet there’s nothing that truly sounds like it. It’s intrinsically minimalist, built atop simple, repeated fragments of vocals, strings, piano, maracas, marimba, clarinet, xylophone, and metallophone. But whereas the term “minimalism” evokes sparseness and austerity, that’s not the case here. Music for Eighteen Musicians bursts forth with rich sound and intricate details as its fourteen movements flow together seamlessly, the instruments weaving in and out of each other gracefully and even playfully.

I can still remember the first time I listened to Music for Eighteen Musicians, sprawled out on my bedroom floor and feeling almost giddy as Reich’s arrangements washed over me; I knew music would never be the same for me ever again.