This happened once before, at least. It was in Memphis-- not the ancient one nestled on the banks of the Nile, the one situated along the Mississippi. In the early sixties, before the Beatles landed upon our shores and seeded the hippies. During those years, young kids became interested in the sounds of folk and blues, scarcely realizing that their Negro gardeners and street-sweepers were once prominent Blues recording artists in their own right before the Depression hit. Right under their noses, folks like Furry Lewis played and sang the blues, scant houses down from them.
Fast-forward to late-90s Williamsburg. After scoring increasingly pricey Brian Eno ambient records like Music for Airports and Discreet Music on Bedford Ave., a group of tousle-headed hipsters walk up to look for cheeky furniture at a vintage store called Lady Bird. Little do they realize that the store's proprietor, William Basinski, beyond the daytime gaze of his patrons, spends his nights distilling string signals from the radio waves into loops of melodic ellipses, weaving them back together like Mark Rothko's blanket, suggesting resonant depth far beyond the surface of radio static. It's something that Basinski has been doing in secret for decades, realizing the symphonies behind refrigerator hum, jackhammers, bum mumbles, subway screech, night bleats, and the low volumes of Klaus Schultze records left looping in the loft space, gleaning the aleatoric ambience of such noises and acting as alembic for their salient features. The River, recorded in 1983, marks the first time any of this work has seen wide release: 1998's Shortwave Music was an impossibly rare 12-inch (also on Raster-Noton), and the rest of his discography is a numbered assortment of self-released CD-Rs.
The River washes out your internal clock. Like the opening currents of Can's Future Days, it lulls you into dream-state. Drowned siren songs and dolphin chirps surface, AM symphonies and Muzak backwash swirl around, a reverberating snap crackle 'n' pop coursing over it all as it begins to move. Over the hour and a half of spectral waves, the tides heave heavenwards and back. Try as I can to hold on, there are no markers to indicate how far I've sunk into the music. If one image that continually loops through my mind as I drift, it is of an enormous ballet of ghostly zeppelins in the midnight sky, filled with careening ball lightning, hovering over the surface of the ocean, its ripples of water swollen with whale songs, rising and falling in a grand, gargantuan gesture.
In terms of psychoactive aural properties, the echoing freefall and slowly evolving twirls of bliss-smoke are reminiscent of another two-disc drop through Nirvana, that of the Taj Mahal Travelers' August 1974. But the emotional undertow here could only match fathoms with a minimalist classic like Gavin Bryars' The Sinking of the Titanic. But The River is without context, an Alka-Seltzer commercial for transubstantiated Body of Christ tabs, peregrinating as they descend to the bottom of the Dead Sea's drinking glass, captured in slow-motion by structuralist filmmaker Michael Snow.
Though it's taken twenty years for these waves to reach 21st century shores, they don't show many wrinkles. In fact, The River is so far ahead of its time that in hindsight, it could only have made sense this far downstream, after the ambitious radio documentation of fringe noises such as the Conet Project's "numbers transmissions" and the noises incorporated into two of last year's more aurally exciting pop releases, Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and the Trail of Dead's Source Tags and Codes (both integrated the sounds of shortwave radios, albeit only to make their guitar songs a bit weirder). It's a final justice that these clippings so mysteriously divined from the heavens can exist on their own infinite plane.
