Lamentations

エクスペリメンタル・レジェンド、ウィリアム・バシンスキーのニューアルバム『LAMENTATIONS』がリリース

ニューヨークを中心に30年近くにわたり、様々な実験的メディアを用いて活躍してきたウィリアム・バシンスキー。

1979年までさかのぼるバシンスキーのアーカイヴからテープ・ループと収集された音によって構成された今作『LAMWNTATIONS』では、2002年作『THE DISINTEGRATION LOOPS』以降のどの作品よりも、アルバム全体に漂う不吉な悲しみ、長く続く喪失感は無限で永遠のものであるように感じさせる。
ウィリアム・バシンスキーの集大成と言っても過言ではない大傑作!

With a patience and effortlessness all his own, ambient composer William Basinskis work communicates visceral emotions with minimal means. His best-known recording, 2002s 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 Basinskis output, hes 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. Its sad and beautiful like much of Basinskis 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. Basinskis 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. Its one of the more accessible of Basinskis offerings, and continues building on the delicate language of subtext and observation that makes his work so important. ~ Fred Thomas