Lamentations

Where William Basinski’s 2019 album, On Time Out of Time, wrung ethereal drones out of data captured from the collision of two black holes, his 2020 follow-up returns to a more personal scale. Like his masterpiece The Disintegration Loops, Lamentations represents a journey into the Los Angeles ambient composer’s collection of tapes gathered over the years, in which loops of strings, voice, or unknown sounds have been slowed and stretched into eerie, wraithlike formations. Some of the source material reportedly dates back as far as 1979, but it sounds positively timeless, conjuring aching melancholy out of ghostly wisps of choir and orchestra. In “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” church bells are smeared into a deep, coppery drone; “The Wheel of Fortune” swirls orchestral snippets into uneasy patterns hanging just on the cusp of dissonance. Originally created for Robert Wilson’s opera The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic, “O, My Daughter, O, My Sorrow” sets a haunting scrap of Balkan folk song against a lulling backdrop of strings, suggesting an apparition rising from a watery grave. But even the most abstract pieces carry a heavy emotional punch: “Silent Spring” is little more than a shadow of an echo, but it beckons powerfully toward the abyss.