William Basinski has announced a new album and 2024 tour dates slated for this fall. The upcoming LP is named September 23rd. Contrary to what that title suggests, the album will arrive four days later on September 27 via Temporary Residence Ltd.. The contemporary experimental composer has also shared a new song from the release, “September 23rd (Excerpt 1),” that you can listen to below.
September 23rd is the first record in a new series Basinski is calling Arcadia Archive, an ongoing archival collection dedicated to the discovery and recovery of his work. Recorded in September 1982 inside his first loft in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, September 23rd was built from a piano piece that Basinski composed in high school before expanding it into a different work.
“The original piano recordings were made on on a piano belonging to my downstairs neighbor, John Epperson – later known more famously as world-renowned drag artist, Lypsinka – at 351 Jay Street aka Casa Degli Artisti, our first loft in New York,” explains Basinski. “It was recoded with a little portable (probably Radio Shack) cassette deck sitting on the piano as I improvised a piece I had been working on since high school. It was pretty terrible, but when I did the John Giorno/William Burroughs cut-up technique, suddenly I had something to put through the Frippertronics loop and feedback loop tape delay system – and boy did I get results. A very prolific time for a young, wacked-out queen in NYC.”
Basinski will perform this new piece and other works at his upcoming fall tour dates. Dubbed the Arcadia Archive Tour, it spans four cities in total—San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and New York—with other performances bookending the run, including stops at the Vancouver International Film Festival and a Plantasia show in Chicago. See Basinski’s full list of tour dates below.
In 2022, Basinski partnered with Janek Schaefer on the collaborative album …On Reflection. His last solo album came out back in 2020, Lamentations, the same year that he returned to his project Sparkle Division to record To Feel Embraced. He also unveiled the archival piece The Clocktower at the Beach last year.
Read the 5-10-15-20 interview “William Basinski on the Music That Made Him.”
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William Basinski:
09-05 Chicago, IL – Garfield Park Conservatory
09-13 San Francisco, CA – Grace Cathedral
09-20 Seattle, WA – Seattle First Baptist Church
09-21 Portland, OR – First Congregational UCC Church
10-02 Vancouver, British Columbia – Vancouver International Film Festival
10-17 Los Angeles, CA – The Nimoy
11-01 New York, NY – Church of the Heavenly Rest
11-02 – Austin, TX – Levitation 2024