November 13 street date. William Basinski's reputation as the foremost producer of profound meditations on death and decay has long been established, but on his new album, "Lamentations", he transforms operatic tragedy into abyssal beauty. More than any other work since "The Disintegration Loops", there is an ominous grief throughout the album, and that sense of loss lingers like an emotional vapor. Captured and constructed from tape loops and studies from Basinski's archives - dating back to 1979 - "Lamentations" is over forty years of mournful sighs meticulously crafted into songs. They are shaped by the inevitable passage of time and the indisputable collapsing of space - and their collective resonance is infinite and eternal.
Feb. 22 street date. Originally released as a limited edition LP on the Three Poplars label in 2003, now available on CD for the first time ever. Some quotes from reviews of the LP version illustrate how this enigmatic earliest of Basinski's released works takes a special place among his catalogue and his listeners: "think how Erik Satie could have sounded like if his most famous pieces had been inserted in a muffling mix after dropping him down a couple of octaves: a lament of decaying sounds, the feeling of a growing sorrow. I suggest you to listen to this on a sunny late afternoon; you could have a lot of secrets revealed" -
Massimo Ricci.
April 29 street date. Vinyl edition to be released later in 2022. Time and duration are core themes in the work of both William Basinski and Janek Schaefer, and this long-distance collaboration took a suitably long gestation of seven years from start to finish. The completed work exhibits those strands of time eloquently and exquisitely. Limitation breeds creativity, being an expression of minimalism and focus. Deploying a delicate piano passage from their collective archive, Basinski and Schaefer weave and reweave in numerous ways, forging a unified flurry of flickering notes. The sounds of various birds heard from late night windows on tour can occasionally be heard throughout, ricocheting off mirrored facades and reflecting on themselves. ". . . on reflection" is a sound celebration of the emotional beauty through our time on Earth, whatever phase you may be going through.