William Basinski is one of the most important musicians working today. His The River is an amazing journey through radio static and ethereal melodies, and his four-disk work, The Disintegration Loops, is not only a transformative work on its own but also a beautiful (if accidental) elegy to 9/11. His latest work is The Garden of Brokenness, a work I first heard about in the liner notes to Basinski’s collaboration with Richard Chartier (William Basinski + Richard Chartier, Spekk 2004), where the artists mentioned taking two works—Basinski’s Garden and another work by Chartier—and fusing them into something totally new, a truly creepy mixture of Chartier’s experimental drones and silences and Basinski’s subtle, esoteric beauty.
The Garden of Brokenness is certainly different from those other works. It’s neither creepy nor complex. In fact, this might be the simplest work Basinski has ever released. However, buried in this simplicity is a universe of fascinating aberrations, and it is the aberrations that really make this piece memorable. In a way, it perfectly encapsulates the definition of ambient music found in David Toop's Ocean of Sound: "works which grasp at the transparency of water, seek to track the journeys of telematic nomads, bottle moods and atmospheres ... or depict impossible, imaginary environments of beauty or terror."
The work consists of two parts that blend together over the course of fifty minutes. The first part is a tranquil piano melody that is played over and over again, in fits and starts, throughout. The second is an echoing, feedback-laden wall of noise that reflects the piano melody back on itself like a room of mirrors, turning the initial melody into a self-replicating monster at one moment (repeating itself over and over in sharper intensity) and dissolving into a gigantic chasm of noise at another moment. The work, then, is a series of waves of differing intensities crashing against the reader’s ears.
At times, the waves are utterly tranquil—the wall of noise barely penetrating the melody. At other times, the melody itself barely penetrates the noise. At still other times, the two sounds fight for bragging rights, slugging it out between our ears. And then there are times when Basinski organizes the two parts of his creation so that they remain separate from one another—the beautiful melody in the foreground, the wave of noise building and humming and breathing in the background.
Article comments
1 - Scott Butki
Great review, Mike. Good to see you found you way here.
I look forward to reading your other reviews.