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Genre:

Experimental

Label:

Temporary Residence Ltd.

Release Date:

2026

William Basinski is a cleric of chance operations, an experimental technician who twists meaning into Möbius strips of decaying tape. That reputation has taken shape during his nearly 50 years as a composer, though it rests largely on 2002’s The Disintegration Loops, the four-volume opus that made his career. In interviews, Basinski happily concedes that the album was an unrepeatable lightning strike. But it was just so damned compelling, the mortal analogy of tape loops deteriorating before our ears, especially after Basinski paired it with photos and videos of smoke over Manhattan, shot from his Brooklyn rooftop on 9/11. A piece about time suddenly became timely. The album’s reputation has saddled the Texas native with the expectation that all his work will engage such weighty concepts and era-defining vibes, to an extent that downplays a significant fact: The guy just likes to make gorgeous music. Passing the Cup of Sorrows, six years after Basinski’s last full-length album, makes that weakness for beauty impossible to ignore.

Basinski’s association with memory is strengthened by his continual return to a vast archive of source material he collected decades ago, as though he were drawing tape from a magic well, as on 2020’s Lamentations. I have no doubt he devised subtle techniques to make Passing the Cup of Sorrows sound as it does; you can hear mysterious seams if you listen closely. But it hits like a live piano performance, transpiring in real time, the electronics sublimed into minimalist vapor. Basinski the composer and performer takes the fore, which feels right for a cultural moment when the idea of insensate mechanical reproduction outlasting humanity isn’t very much fun.

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Mentioned out of context, those 9/11 images that have become part of The Disintegration Tapes’ lore risk sounding merely provocative or even exploitative, but that reading runs counter to the composer’s deeply humanist, even sentimental, discography. Basinski’s music feels; it yearns and grieves. It’s fascinating how the tape slips away from us, sure, and how he finds ways to crudely automate the creative act, but the memories sloughing away are his and ours, and so is the sense of loss. Passing the Cup of Sorrows takes inspiration from the past-life regression concept of souls making amends between lives, a touching framework for a meditation on forgiveness.

He also pays homage to Morton Feldman, who’s as synonymous with very slow music as Basinski is with tape loops. Though excitingly uncentered, Passing the Cup of Sorrows has little of the unnerving harmonic quicksand that Feldman lured us into in pieces like Triadic Memories. Instead it’s a graciously sonorous song for fans of Budd and Satie—rapt and grave, but oh so lightly. It starts with a few sustained chords in the left hand, a lulling motif condensing in the right, hard and foggy like dry ice. The changes are strewn far apart, the gaps filled by a ghostly atmosphere of magnetic interference and soft breaths, minute scribbles, shushing waves of static.

Using these limited materials, Basinski embarks on a vast and protean 40 minutes. The piece imperceptibly shades through moods: now radiant, now immured in darkness, but always calm, focused, tender. The center of gravity shifts from low to high and back, the melody reconstituted in rumbles and trills. A throaty, airy chorus of drone loops transforms the harmonic texture of the entire second half. Sometimes a sliver of chord will seem to get snared in a rogue delay, or chopped off or scooped out, suggesting that the music may be more mediated than it appears. But an analytical frame of mind can’t hold up long against the performance’s emotive sweep.

As the piece evolves, it’s up to the listener to decide where the melody resolves, which melodic landmarks feel like coming home. I cling to this little motif that strains up a semitone, backslides a whole step, then does it again, like an inextinguishable flicker of hope. Basinski’s stuff can take time to sink into, but I found Passing the Cup of Sorrows easy to love right away, somehow both a monumental work and a lovely around-the-house album. In a way it’s the mirror image of The Disintegration Loops: Instead of the same recorded material changing, an array of live material somehow stays the same, floating in a bubble of heightened feeling and awareness.

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