William Basinski’s New Piano Work Takes Its Title From Past Life Regression Therapy

William Basinski’s new release is one piece for piano, 30 minutes long, out this month on Temporary Residence Ltd. Passing the Cup of Sorrows keeps him inside ambient and drone, but changes the source: a keyboard rather than the decaying tape loops of The Disintegration Loops, the six-hour project assembled from recordings he made decades earlier and which now approaches its 25th anniversary.

The title comes from past life regression therapy. In hypnotherapy there is a concept called Life Between Lives, in which two souls exchange energy in the spirit world so that one can understand and forgive whoever hurt it in a previous life. Basinski sets that idea to a gentle piano figure, letting silence and the sound of sobbing carry as much weight as the notes. It is melancholy and calm at once, more concerned with making room for grief than with resolving it.

He describes his process as intuitive. Speaking with Treble, he called his accumulated loops and tapes “my particular broken things,” and compared the onset of a piece to being pregnant: get rid of it, get in the studio, dig around. His archive reaches back to unmarked cassettes recorded in late-1970s New York, some of which he is still finding and not all of which he intends to release.

Forgiveness, framed this way, is less an exchange between two people than a private act. Thirty minutes of piano is enough time to practice it.