WIlliam Basinski: Lamentations | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Fuck, I love ambient works. On the flip side, fuck I hate talking about ambient works. There’s an odd hurdle to get over when you attempt to speak accurately about pieces of music that see modern song structures, gives them two fingers, and tells them to sod off. William Basinski was my first trip into this realm, and one of the artists I cannot stop returning to. The way in which Basinski immerses you into worlds all unto themselves -somewhere between our physically real and a viscous other where we can barely get our bearings. Much as with his contemporary The Caretaker, time works in a different way when they take you to the latter one. How it sits doesn’t feel quite right and it perturbs me to no end. On that idea of time, Lamentations has been spliced together with an audio treasure trove of Basinski's archives, reaching as far back as 1979. There’s a palpable weight, hanging off every moment. It’s an uncanny valley where emotions are played upon deeply and you can’t quite pinpoint where they’ve come from. Bear with me my friends, I’ll try to articulate the intangible.

Dark, opaque, and ultimately oppressive clouds are dragged overhead by For Whom The Bell Tolls. This passage makes the air around become balmy enough you can feel it on your skin. With the unreasoning march of nature, we’re swallowed by its progression and then swamped again by the next number, The Wheel of Fortune. Containing a comparatively busy few minutes, chopped melodic passages cutting short pretend to be the song's beat as stabs of shimmering cut through in an anxiety-inducing inclusion. You’re not quite prepared for these blaring sirens and it inserts some more life into the album. With a slow a fade that starts a minute before the song actually ends, by the time you realise it’s over, it’s long evaporated into the ether. This obliviousness to the passage of time is thoroughly compounded in Paradise Lost. Sonic submarines are menaced by waning, failing sonar, aimlessly yet hopefully emitting its call, attempting to gauge where it's at, all while spiralling into the endless depths. Eerie undersea sights passed on the bleak way down include the alarmingly bare Tear Vial, then Transfiguration’s metallic belly warbling with an endless resonance and also a muted, smothered, degraded reprise of Paradise Lost in the form of Punch & Judy. Haunting vocals from O, My Daughter O, My Sorrow are brought back in triumphant fashion as the composition swells into choral beauty. Tape noise crumbles away underneath the weight making these sections actually quite delicate. Please, This Shit Has To Stop features similarly angelic vocals and they’re our only taste of humanity at all in Lamentations even though they're not quite human themselves. They’re too disembodied to be real. The album unravels and finally disintegrates on Fin. Similar to The Wheel of Fortune, everything disappears without even giving you a goodbye; it’s just gone.

This record has hooked me in a way where I want to uncover ever minor moment and discover every second of mystery in it…but maybe that’s not the point. It may well ruin the mystery, the amorphous timescape William Basinski has stewed up in his cauldron, with ingredients from over forty years ago. Treat yourself to this record and bask in the strange, serene sound of the other world where, as your stoner mate who spends all their time on the computer says, “time is just an illusion, man”. Lamentations is its own universe, and it’s where I live now.

- Matt Lynch.
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