The ambient composer goes back to raiding his decades-deep personal archives for vintage tape to revive with new perspective and fresh feeling.
Though he deals in abstract sound, William Basinski in many ways resembles a visual artist. It was a picture—the diagram of Brian Eno and Robert Fripp’s tape-delay system on the cover of Discreet Music—that catalyzed his interest in that style of composition. His most famous creation, The Disintegration Loops, is as strongly associated with an image—the smoldering New York skyline after the 9/11 attacks—as it is with magnetic tape shedding its last oxides. And there is something sculptor-like about his intimacy with plastic loops, more attuned to the transient truth of the medium than the immortal dream of recorded sound. All of this fits with his great theme of mortal decline.
The best description of Basinski’s music, including his latest album, Lamentations, is found in art rather than music theory. Mise en abyme, which literally means “put into the abyss,” describes an infinite sequence nested in different levels of reality: a story within a story, a picture within a picture, a reflection trapped between mirrors. By playing with loops as vivid as human lives—a wisp of piano, a speck of opera, a ripple of radio static—against one another, Basinski produces feedback loops that repeat until they become vanishingly small, not so much ending as slipping beyond our ken.
Last year, Basinski released On Time Out of Time, for which he worked with scientists to capture the sound of two black holes merging more than a billion years ago. He called it a love story. While the high-tech collaboration was unusual for him, the personal touch wasn’t, and on Lamentations, he’s back to raiding his decades-deep personal archives for vintage tape to revive with new perspective and fresh feeling. If the beauty and dread of Lamentations plays out on a less dwarfing scale, the galactic rumble of the first song, “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” sounds as much like a black hole as anything on Time did, and the album’s theme has a sort of self-swallowing gravity.
Lamentations shares a title with the biblical poem of exile and loss (“How deserted lies the city, once so full of people!”) and, to drive the point home, adds a whiff of Miltonic damnation with a track called “Paradise Lost.” “O, My Daughter, O, My Sorrow,” a study Basinski made for Robert Wilson’s opera The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic, is a haunting centerpiece. It integrates a passage of Svetlana Spajic singing an old Balkan song, a mother-daughter dialogue that doubles as one’s lament and the other’s celebration of the so-called loss of innocence. Focusing on a line that translates as “Out of joy, I could not fall asleep,” the track is exhilarating, and choked human emotion somehow rises through the mechanical phrasings of the loops. Other operatic samples appear in “All These Too, I, I Love”—chopped into mellifluous vowels for a moment of brilliant simplicity recalling Gas’s Pop—and “Please, This Shit Has Got to Stop.”
That frank colloquial title breaks the elevated register, but there’s room for all in Basinski’s quiet threnody for one. If “Fin” is a doomsaying ending, where remnants of life flicker through vast, buzzing machinery, his great sorrow also allows kinder prophecies glint through, as on “Transfiguration,” which sounds like a string quartet casting a hesitant, hopeful theme into the abyss of the unknown. Paradise may forever be lost, but this elegant elegy is worth many returns.
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