William Basinski - Lamentations

A Closer Listen

A low, slow, bell tolls during the opening minutes of Lamentations.  The album title references the Jewish book of mourning; the track title references John Donne. We are in a time of lamentation right now, and the bell tolls for all of us.

Lamentations is arguably William Basinski‘s best work since Disintegration Loops.  Due to the current context, it may even be better: the composer shares his talents when they are most needed, with timbres fitting to the time.  Nostalgia, disintegration and lamentation are all themes of the year ~ and happen to be Basinski’s specialties.  The album comes across as a study in deep loss, but also in deep beauty.  Some tracks approach haunted ballroom music without the supernatural; instead, the music comes across like the opening of an old photo album, the pages stuck together while the chemical colors are leached.

The literary references continue.  “Paradise Lost” is 1:23, a fleeting thought, a memory slipping away before it can be fully recalled.  But even this is balanced with a modicum of hope: the title of “Tear Vial” refers to Psalm 56:8:  “Thou tellest my wanderings; put thou my tears into thy bottle; are they not in thy book?”  But to demonstrate the complexity of emotion, “O My Daughter, O My Sorrow” is drenched with operatic vocals while recalling the exclamation of Jephthah (Judges 11:35), mourning a sorrow that could have been avoided.  A late reference to Rachel Carson (“Silent Spring”) widens the horizon; we’re not just in the midst of a pandemic, but of climate change and climate denial, sparking the decidedly direct non-literary title “Please, This Shit Has Got To Stop,” a sentence difficult to pin on the elegant, intellectual Basinski ~ but these are desperate times.

Lamentations is empathetic, because everyone, everywhere is mourning something.  Whenever we recognize the universal nature of the human experience, we are better able to understand not only our neighbors, but our global community.  Our shared lamentation rises to heaven no matter what our religion of lack thereof.  Whether we rail against God or the fates, our frustration is the same.  We return to earth spent.

But as bitter as the writings of Lamentations may be (“How deserted lies the city … she remembers all the treasures that were hers in days of old”), a thin vein of hope continues to pulse (“Because of the LORD’s great love, we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail”).  In like manner, the longest loops (“All These Too, I, I Love”) provoke contemplation.  Thoughts tumble until they cause madness or lead one to think in another way.  The act of lamentation assumes there is someone to lament to: a presence, hopefully benign, alive and active despite impressions to the contrary.  The title “Transfiguration” may refer to a Biblical event or the possibility of individual and societal change.  The choral vocals offer comfort: an intimation of the divine.  (Richard Allen)

The Quietus

William Basinski took the long road to relative fame, through Texan art school and New York arts spaces, failing to bother the limelight while he accumulated ideas and tapes of muzak, nabbed from the airwaves, stretched and slowed. What it left him with was a well-packed vault.

Unearthing a heap of these tapes in the back of his New York loft in 2001, Basinski discovered the wasting effect endless looping had on them and realised its potential. Letting magnetic nature do its thing, he came up with The Disintegration Loops that became a magnificent, mournful elegy to the victims of 9/11 and made his name. Just pieces of experimental music, playing over and over again.

If it all sounds simple – if fiddly – the magic is in the imagination, Basinski’s and ours. The repetition is mesmerising, bringing on a dream state at best or a kind of forgetful distraction at least, letting music take almost physical shape, a shape your mind populates. But its emotional heft is in the slow decay of the loop, the degrading of the source causing it to change gradually and then dramatically. If The Disintegration Loops start as a grand statement, they end as a scratched message, still just about recognisable as the same story, but robbed of flesh and context. They mirror a lifecycle.

For Lamentations, after twenty years of further adventures in musique concrète and beyond, Basinski has delved back into the boxes of tapes gathered through four decades of messing about with loops and clarinets, and come up with a kind of greatest hits. Where The Disintegration Loops and releases in between (like single-suite meditations Vivian & Ondine and Cascade and last year’s near-symphonic On Time Out Of Time) have felt all of a piece; Lamentations has more of a sense of separation, tracks you can pick out as individual moods. There’s a pervading feeling of grief as the title suggests, but each morsel offers something different, a glimmer of hope maybe, or a crushing end. ‘Transfiguration’, with its elegant swell of horns, picks some prettiness out of the gloom; ‘Silent Spring’ conjures a monster out of the white noise.

‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’ is thick with foreboding, its rather literal bell struggling to emerge from the storm before dominating then fading again. It’s a vast chasm of noise that takes you to the halls of Hades. ‘O, My Daughter, O, My Sorrow’ reverberates through equally wide spaces, but a heavily treated voice ebbs and flows, moving from ghostly suggestion to overpowering force. This isn’t a listen you can drift through. Pieces are punctuated by moments of horror or emotional devastation, with every chime and distant ricochet on ‘Tear Vial’ an ache of the heart, every eardrum buzz of Morse code on ‘Punch And Judy’ a creeping menace.

The off-centre centrepiece of the album is an eleven-minute call-back to former glories. ‘All These Too, I, I Love’ has an ostensible quasi-pop catchiness to match 2019’s ‘4(E+D)4(ER=EPR)’, but its looping of gunshots, French horn and a brief operatic phrases feel closer than anything to The Disintegration Loops – only this time Basinski is cheating a little, fading elements in and out, adding longueurs, maybe even cutting up sounds deliberately. That’s his prerogative, and the results are beautiful, an upside to all this desolation, a lengthy excursion among the snippets. Perhaps there could have been a couple more of these at the expense of some of the shorter, less obviously complete pieces, but as a fascinating clear-up exercise, Lamentations makes a virtue of its small sorrows.

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Read Brian Howe’s review of the album.