- This newly reissued, and often beautiful, 2007 drone album shows the late New York firebrand's keen grasp of experimental music.
- Imagine, if you will, that Lou Reed released Hudson River Wind Meditations in 1975—the same year as his noise masterpiece Metal Machine Music, which alienated fans who were just getting used to the idea of Reed as a rock star. The backlash would've been equally devastating, if not more, perhaps the subject of decades of jokes. Who knows what Lester Bangs would've written about it, or how it might have clashed in the public consciousness with his reputation as a New York hardass.
In reality, Reed released this album of ambient drone music for tai chi and relaxation in 2007. This was deep into his tenure as alt-rock's dean emeritus, during a time when Reed could be more easily forgiven for releasing music that tickled his fancy rather than trying to sustain a pop career. Reed enjoyed producing experimental music, and for all the hoopla about Metal Machine Music being a deliberate fuck-you, it's clear in hindsight that he was just making something he liked listening to and enjoyed playing. The idea of a major artist producing more experimental and lower-stakes music in parallel with their mainstream career is more acceptable now that big names like Drake and Charli XCX can brand their less radio-friendly whims as mixtapes released in the space between proper albums––and now that people no longer have to buy music to know what it sounds like.
Combine that with a newfound appetite for New Age music in the last decade, and Hudson River Wind Meditations starts to look something like a lost classic. It's shrewd of Light in the Attic to reissue the album at this point in time, especially since much of the onus for the New Age revival falls on their own 2013 compilation I Am the Center, which helped artists like Laraaji and the late Iasos find late-career critical laurels. In this context, it doesn't matter much at all that this album was made by the same Lou Reed who helmed the Velvet Underground, no more than it mattered that the Los Angeles flautist André 3000, whose New Blue Sun is the New Age revival's biggest mainstream moment yet, used to be in OutKast.
The Reed of 2007 seemed like a gentler one than the notorious grouch of his '70s interviews, but even titles like "Move Your Heart" and "Find Your Note" bely a streak of realism and pragmatism. This music isn't pretty the way that, say, Laraaji's is, and it doesn't seem interested in transporting the listener to another place. It feels more like an accompaniment to one man's private practice, with no acknowledgement tacit or otherwise of its creator's past work (even André 3000 had to apologise to fans hoping for a rap album in one of the track titles). One imagines Reed vanishing, a tiny figure among many practising tai chi in the park, into the hum of eight million people.
The two long tracks that define Hudson River Wind Meditations sound like the screeching of trains, the rumble of traffic, the buzz of machinery, the babble of indistinct voices—and maybe just a little bit like the water and wind. One cannot easily imagine it being "played." Dreamed, maybe. It almost seems to emanate from the listening environment itself, emerging out of the ceaseless noise made by millions of people whose secrets are concealed within the impenetrable façade of the city itself.
The first of these tracks is "Move Your Heart," clocking in at just shy of 29 minutes. This is the more conventionally ambient of the two long tracks, comprising a drone that ducks in and out of silence every few seconds. Sometimes the filter is more obvious and the effect is like a wah pedal. Later in the song, it becomes more like an emanation that appears and disappears, over and over, like a windshield repeatedly being wiped clean only to fog up again. That the sound itself is so soothing adds to the hypnotic effect. This is a fantastic drone piece, which becomes less surprising when you consider that Reed has long existed adjacent to the New York minimalist community and that Metal Machine Music was inspired by drone godfather La Monte Young.
"Find Your Note," at 31 minutes and 35 seconds, is the less approachable of the two owing to the trebly sine waves that dance at the top of the mix, which may prove ear-piercing to listeners who haven't already bombarded their senses with the kind of gruelling drone performances Young hosted in the '60s. If "Move Your Heart" resembles the work of Young or the younger minimalist Charlemagne Palestine, then "Find Your Note" has more in common with Folke Rabe's What? and Éliane Radigue's Trilogie de la Mort, where the drone shifts in such nearly imperceptible real time that it never seems to be shifting, even while it is—constantly. Those looking for a tai chi soundtrack might have a hard time with the high end, but "Find Your Note" rewards a focused listening experience to see how gracefully it changes, to hear the high overtones that dance across its surface.
The remaining two tracks are shorter and feel like context for the other two. "Wind Coda" clocks in at about five minutes and is really just a megamix of the other tracks, condensing over an hour of music into the length of one of Reed's rock songs. Then there's "Hudson River Wind (Blend The Ambiance)," which appears to be a simple recording of wind. Its appearance is like one of those moments in biopics where real photos or footage of the subject shows up on the screen for extra emotional oomph. It's as if to say that everything we just heard is an abstraction of that sound, the everyday sound of Reed's life. The greatest emotional takeaway from this music isn't a calm, centred feeling but the artist's joy in his private practice—at being able to be a normal person once in a while, lost among the millions of lives and secrets in New York.
Tracklist01. Move Your Heart
02. Find Your Note
03. Hudson River Wind (Blend The Ambiance)
04. Wind Coda