With a patience and effortlessness all his own, ambient composer
William Basinski's work communicates visceral emotions with minimal means. His best-known recording, 2002's
The Disintegration Loops, utilized slowly decaying analog tape loops as a poignant reflection on the inevitable passing of time, and offered wordless commentary on the grief and confusion surrounding the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11. Though
The Disintegration Loops has become the strongest example of
Basinski's output, he's expanded on themes of nature, decay, and loss on many subsequent albums while experimenting with new techniques involving source material and sonic architecture. For
Lamentations,
Basinski culled through a massive archive of tapes and sound fragments, returning, in a sense, to the loop-based format he used with
The Disintegration Loops. This collection is fundamentally different in that instead of letting short passages play out until they naturally eroded, here we have 12 individual pieces with various moods that flow more like a traditional album than a long-form meditation. "The Wheel of Fortune" overlaps several different loops, with waves of ghostly piano chords, underwater orchestra sounds, and stop-start tape manipulations all rising and fading in the mix. The muted, blurry chamber-music sounds of "Paradise Lost" and the slow-moving drift of "Transfiguration" have some of the same cloudy melancholy that
Basinski excels at, but the album on the whole is much more diverse. "O My Daughter, O My Sorrow" is a subaquatic drone, lingering in a vast glowing emptiness before the sound of distant singing creeps into the mix. It's sad and beautiful like much of
Basinski's work, but in a way that feels new for him. The 11-minute "All These Too, I, I Love" is more playful, beginning with what sounds like a sample of opera singing and slowly bringing in and out warped passages of skipping record-needle sounds and glitchy snippets of classical music. The reverb-heavy loop of skipping opera vocals on "Please, This Shit Has Got to Stop" is similar. The recontextualized audio on these songs brings to mind the scratchy antiquated 78s of
the Caretaker, much like the more vacuous ambience of other tracks is similar to early
Grouper recordings.
Basinski's experiments with sounds less familiar to his ouvre hardly come off like a storied artist trying to keep pace with those that followed him. Like everything else in his catalog,
Basinski approaches the varying chapters of
Lamentations with an openness and fluidity that gels together even his most dissimilar ideas.
Lamentations wanders cautiously between dark and hovering gloom, tender reflection, and moments of wistful nostalgia that almost feel gleeful. It's one of the more accessible of
Basinski's offerings, and continues building on the delicate language of subtext and observation that makes his work so important. ~ Fred Thomas
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