The sustain pedal was one of the greatest discoveries of my life. I still remember the first few times I ever sat at a piano, holding it down and letting the notes vibrate against each other until they faded to imperceptibility. And then doing it again.
Incredibly, the sound of felt hammers on metal strings can be used to express almost any emotion you could name. In 1979, when he first recorded the piano loops used on The Garden of Brokenness, William Basinski says he was attempting capture "mono no aware," a Japanese concept whose closest English translation is "the sadness of things." "Things" could be taken two ways, of course-- it may refer to the general state of being alive, or to literal, physical objects. Either way, these sad, slow piano loops are the kind of sounds that poke around in your guts looking for sensitive spots to nestle into.
The sound of The Garden of Brokenness should be familiar to anyone who's dipped into Basinski's well of recently reconstituted old tapes before-- it shares more than a passing affinity with Variations: A Movement in Chrome Primitive, A Red Score in Tile, or December 2004's Silent Night, being drawn from the same well. The record consists of one 50-minute pianoscape, really no more than a couple of chords wandering in their own reverb. As the loop persists, Basinski mixes it with soft drones and the sounds of amplitude modulation. The piece is punctuated by two lengthy passages of near-silence, where the sound that builds up over the preceding minutes is allowed to die away to nothing, clearing the air completely for the next build-up.
As beautiful as it is, there is a certain sense on The Garden of Brokenness that Basinski has been here before, and that his supply of old tapes may be running out. He's proven his ability to work outside of his aging archives with his Watermusic series, and I suspect that his rewarding series of records built around these decaying sound sources may soon come to an end. Should that be the case, no worries: Basinski has injected more than his share of beauty into the world through these recordings.
