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.
