September 23rd - 2024 US Temporary Residence Limited Dark Blue Label 1-track LP

Following his archival release The Clocktower at the Beach in 2013, a piece originally composed in 1979, William Basinski reaches even deeper into his musical history as he embarks on his ever more ambitious Arcadia Archives series. Drawing from tape loops that are over four decades old now but still holding influence, Basinski sonically extends their lifetimes, elasticating a few short seconds of material into a whole LP’s worth of drowned ambience on the series’ first release September 23rd.

A continuous piece split into excerpts, September 23rd is built around a piano recording that ebbs and flows, disappears and returns, evaporates and recombines. Recorded in Basinski’s Brooklyn loft in 1982, a former iron works turned studio fancifully dubbed Arcadia, it goes even further back to a high school composition in the mid 70s. As such, the context folds into the piece: time stretching out in the glacial textures, overtones singing with magic amidst the sonic slurry, the melody transformed through the dense saturation of tape delay.

A simple, fragile, vulnerable three part piano phrase repeats into the gloom, glimmering subsurface keys eventually lost in the wash. It sounds like a literal drop in the ocean as a lone key press calls out into the churning reverberations, a spitting stalactite in a vast subterranean cavity. Throughout the glassy blur of cut up tape loops, the thunks of fingers on keys take on a rocking motion, morphing into the form of clangs and bells tolling in the distance, then gracefully fading out in the recording’s original form, as if nothing had ever changed at all.

William Basinski’s September 23rd is elegant and delicate, yet swells with emotional resonance.