Avant-garde composers William Basinski and Janek Schaefer have teamed up on a new album for Temporary Residence Ltd.
. . . on reflection, a five-song collaboration, was created between Los Angeles and London. Time and duration are core themes in the work of both Basinski and Schaefer’s work, and this long-distance collaboration took a suitably long gestation of eight years—from 2014 and 2022—from start to finish. In that time, our collective perception of time has at times become disorienting, and . . . on reflection remodels that instability as a work of art that’s “unmoored by time or space.”
“. . . on reflection looks backwards, a bustling revelry of positive emotions heard through the ageing mirrors of memory,” we’re told. “It is a celebratory meditation where sound shimmers through time like the light of the sea’s waves glistening as it folds and unfolds upon itself.”
Alongside the announcement, Basinski and Schaefer have shared the album’s first track, accompanied with a video cut from Basinski’s forthcoming feature film, “Iceland Celeste,” co-directed with his longterm partner James Elaine. Deploying a delicate piano passage from their collective archive, Basinski and Schaefer weave and reweave in numerous ways, forging an iridescent flurry of flickering melodies.
The album is dedicated to the late Harold Budd.
Tracklisting
01. . . . on reflection (one)
02. . . . on reflection (two)
03. . . . on reflection (three)
04. . . . on reflection (four)
05. . . . on reflection (five)
. . . on reflection LP is scheduled for April 29 release. Meanwhile, you can stream “. . . on reflection (one)” in full below and pre-order here.