William Basinski
The Garden Of Brokenness

Everyone has a pair of wings, but only those who dream learn to fly. (Jim Morrison)

Everything begins with us inside the womb. An ethereal piano, timeless and placeless, is breathing. In the silence, we rotate imperceptibly around our almost-body. Gradually, the sound gets tainted, distant noises can be heard. Elusive sonic soot. That soot we hear in the drowsiness of the early afternoon, of course for those who usually indulge in the activity of a post-lunch nap. The atmosphere is suspended. The soot then mixes with the piano, and the game continues; it's like a light roundelay, in slow motion. Suddenly, a light comes into view. Perhaps we are about to emerge...The time has come, then. Meanwhile, gentle nameless pulsations resound. It's the little heart, slowly swelling with life. We wait, listening intently. We try to catch something. Suddenly, someone from somewhere says, "This all seems familiar, yet..." It’s true, I say to myself, I feel the same sensation. So what is it? We continue to listen closely. At regular intervals, like falling into a void, long pauses. Now everything is white.....

It may seem difficult or aristocratic, but Basinsky's approach to music is very natural and transparent. If we want to talk about avant-garde, it's better to pair it with the term: "unadorned". The atmospheres are essentially those of Brian Eno's "Discreet Music", but the means to achieve them are the layering of different tapes that increase in number as the minutes pass. This is more than ambient music; it is a kind of therapeutic trance-ambient. Because it unveils the colors silence has. The atmospheres are slowed down, the sounds in progression.

"The Garden of Brokenness" (2005), a singular track of fifty minutes, is just one of the many cathedrals of clouds created in recent years by William Basinsky. He had already done so with his "Disintegration Loops" between 2001 and 2003, superimposing different tapes to create long ambient tracks. On that occasion, the work was done in memory of the September 11 attacks; the music, slow and sooty, was the mute and tragic photo of the flying remnants of the World Trade Center, which we all still have engraved in our memory. Ethereal sounds that blend with earthly noises, then; this is what Basinsky's research is based on, who more than one person has defined as "the man who elevated the loop to art, at the passage between two centuries." Undoubtedly an artist to discover, undoubtedly an essential reference point for modern experimental ambient.

But we left off at the moment when everything was white... Now, the overlaps of sounds and echoes are at their peak, but their fit is so simple and perfect that we practically hear none of them. We float amused. Occasionally, we encounter air bubbles, from which we catch glimpses of ourselves, stationary, watching this strange procession of neurons. We are observing ourselves, as in a dream. There’s a sense of well-being all around. Suddenly, one last fall into the void. Silence. The room lights up. We rub our eyes: now we are awake. A disc has just finished spinning in the player. Someone somewhere says "I get it, maybe I had fallen asleep..." I'm not too sure, though; I feel like I never really fell asleep. Then, in the end, I understand everything, and I tell the others.

We weren't about to emerge from the womb; we just re-entered it, even if only for an hour or so.