William Basinski : September 23rd
If you weren’t told this was an archival release, you’d never know. William Basinski, best known by just about everyone for The Disintegration Loops and that specific pre-traumatic hauntological vision of 9/11 and everything that would come after, an eerie and somber metaphysician of perpetual grief, has built a career from these specific approaches to ambience and drone. The timbre of his work, at least musically speaking, could comfortably sit alongside any yoga studio’s New Age greats or slot in comfortably in a playlist of Windham Hill bangers. There is an emotional texture, however, a melancholia, this gothic gentility that feels like falling half-asleep beneath a tree planted at graveside, that marks all of his work. Work, it should be noted, that often arose in similar fashion to this one, which is a scattered concatenation of history, a modern treatment of a recorded piano improvisation done decades earlier of a brief piano melody he wrote years before even that. These are ideas filtered through the sediment of time, transmuted alchemically by an artist-in-time in a mirror to how the Frippertronics-driven ambience of these loops changes them.
The start of this long piece is admittedly boring even by ambient standards. The melody which forms the backbone of these improvisations in ambience and drone repeats unchanged for nearly a full minute; it produces nearly a kind of misophonia, like the sensation of hearing someone smacking their lips and chewing and breathing heavily while you want quiet. So it’s a pleasant shock when the effects kick in, slur the repetition to a slow-mo Pink Floyd just like you were captured in that brilliant middle section of “Echoes” all over again, and that sense of frustration almost immediately dissipates in its entirety. The long piece sits within this dissociative domain; some ambient pieces, especially Fripp’s own, develop into these rich harmonic beds, or allow a subtlety of rhythm to accumulate as loping loops generate natural syncopations. Here, it is texture, the granularity of wind, the water droplets of reverb-effected electric piano, the crystal hum as the note echoes out in open air.
Granularity and noise produce an interesting elementality to drone works; we often see comparisons to fire, to earth, to wind and air, all coming from the same root element, that being the distortion and grain of the texture of a piece. This one in its variations lacks the dynamical intensity of fire, lacks the sediment-heavy weight of earth, that natural bassiness. It is wind and water, like a breeze picking up over a pond. The oceanic character of these repeated piano notes is not, as per some pieces, oceanic. There is an intimacy here. The vastness, because almost all ambient and drone records gesture inevitably toward phenomenological vastness in some capacity, exists more in the contemplation of the empty spaces between sounds, the natural alienation of things as objects embedded in a much larger engulfing space. It provokes a strange kind of claustrophobia in September 23rd, a complete inversion of what one might suspect. A shift here or there might call to mind images of trains, of streetlights, of the stonework of old cities amidst snow flurries and biting cold or the driving hiss of persistent rain.
It’s hard with especially imagistically rich drone records not to view them inevitably as films or novels, better at capturing the evocative core of other mediums through a pure immersion in sound than most lyrically based approaches are. Basinski here feels as much Tarkovsky as Ana Kavan, as much Bela Tarr as Osamu Dazai. There is this great sense of the sojourner, faulty, scabrous, a sinner driven out whether justifiably or not, who seeks shelter among the unforgiving stones and sticks and caves and rivers of the wild, a human beyond the human, beyond humanity. The timbre of the record does not inspire hope; there is a bleak sense, a conjured doom, which suffuses the repeating figures. The stories of the people previously mentioned are too often unhappy ones, the subject driven from the world in search of some ineffable grace out in the wilds of the world only to find a chthonic alienation, the terror of the world teeming with insects. This would be a fitting soundtrack to the experimental “documentary” (in reality an adaptation of a novel-cum-diary) The Sound of Insects, a narrative about a Japanese man who commits suicide by going to the forest with a tent and mummifying himself with salts as he starves to death. This is a soundtrack of both the continuity and the disfigurement of passing time, how we can see images of the same face, the same body, but do not feel the same self, the way we inherit a life made by a version of ourselves already dead, rich in the shame and confusion of missteps and errors, both individual and communal.
Label: Temporary Residence
Year: 2024
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