William Basinski / Deforrest Brown Jr.

William Basinski presents a new iteration of The Garden of Brokenness, reimagined as a requiem for three pianos, percussion and vaporetto drone. The world premiere features a transcription by acclaimed pianist Adam Tendler, a close collaborator of Basinski. Conceived as a ritual offering, the performance invites listeners to pass the cup of sorrows—to dwell in stillness and hold space for a fragile sense of shared humanity. This commission continues Basinski’s long engagement with memory, decay, and the poetics of repetition and functions as both a lament and invocation. It unfolds as an extended gesture of mourning, suspended in time and attentive to the raw suffering of children. As the world tilts towards grief, the work answers not with resolution, but with a patient, echoing attention.

In this performance, rhythmanalyst DeForrest Brown, Jr. approaches the studio space as a meta-instrument, probing the underlying conceptual infrastructure of techno. His work examines techno not simply as a musical genre but as a system of thought. This approach evokes what Brown describes as a post-digital “synoptic audio”, where sound operates as a perceptual and philosophical conduit, mapping the entanglement of embodied experience and technological mediation. In this framework, electronic music becomes a form of real-time inquiry: an improvised diagnostic system that confronts the architectures of its own production and consumption while proposing alternative modes of listening and musical knowledge.