Audiopile Review: The first release in a new series of archival work from the great William Basinski, this new piece going all the way back to 1982, not too far from the time when he had initially recorded the music that would go on to become the hallowed Disintegration Loops. Clearly inspired by the then burgeoning world of Eno’s ambient music and the closely associated Frippertronics, Basinski utilizes a simplistic piano piece that he’d composed as a teenager, running its repetitive and affecting refrain through a murky haze of tape delay. The haunting echo of the piano submerges and surfaces in the thickening ambience, a heavy coat of swampy tape effects damn near threaten to bury it completely at times, though it always bobs back up for another breath. It probably comes closest to his Variations For Piano And Tape, a CD-only release issued in 2006 which also toys with the same revelry through repetition and ferric oxide manipulation. Not sure how many more releases we can expect in this new series, but we’re off to an incredible start. And Sept 23rd is gonna be hard to top!

September 23rd is the first release in William Basinski’s new Arcadia Archive series. Recorded in September 1982 in his first loft in the pre-gentrified DUMBO neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, September 23rd is a recently unearthed early entry in what has become a hugely inspirational and influential catalog.

Built from a piano piece that Basinski composed in high school in the mid-1970s, September 23rd quickly evolved into a vastly different work. As Basinski explains: “The original piano recordings were made on on a piano belonging to my downstairs neighbor, John Epperson – later known more famously as world-renowned drag artist, Lypsinka – at 351 Jay Street aka Casa Degli Artisti, our first loft in New York. It was recoded with a little portable (probably Radio Shack) cassette deck sitting on the piano as I improvised a piece I had been working on since high school. It was pretty terrible, but when I did the John Giorno/William Burroughs cut-up technique, suddenly I had something to put through the Frippertronics loop and feedback loop tape delay system – and boy did I get results. A very prolific time for a young, wacked-out queen in NYC.”

William Basinski’s musical career spans nearly five decades, and has harnessed an uncanny gift for taking empathetic works of great melancholy and crafting tragic worlds of abyssal depth. The discovery of September 23rd provides a beguiling bit of luminescence to Basinski’s provenance and expanding historical legacy.