ARCHIVE

Hudson River Wind Meditations (reissue, 2007) LIGHT IN THE ATTIC

8/10

Zen instrumentals from downtown. By Louis Pattison

LOU REED COURTEST OF CANAL STREET COMMUNICATIONS INC

THE Hudson River begins somewhere way up in the Appalachian highlands and flows 315 miles south through upstate New York, dividing Manhattan and New Jersey as it filters out into the Atlantic Ocean. Lou Reed had sung of the river on “Romeo Had Juliette”, agritty love song from 1989’s New York that used the dystopian city as a stage: “Manhattan’s sinking like a rock/Into the filthy Hudson, what ashock”. But by the time he released Hudson River Wind Meditations in April 2007 the river had taken on a different character for him. Visible from the window of the downtown penthouse that he shared with his wife Laurie Anderson, the Hudson became the backdrop to his daily life, its slow-moving waters a constant and calming presence.

Across five decades, Lou Reed’s creative muse had taken him to the highest highs, the lowest lows, and everywhere in between. But Hudson River Wind Meditations finds him in a place of perfect equilibrium. Reed’s final solo album, it appeared in 2007, four years after the Edgar Allan Poe-inspired concept suite The Raven, and another four years before Lulu, the Metallica collaboration that became his swansong. It is quite unlike either. Clocking in at an hour, it consists of four gently undulating instrumental pieces that have an extended, durational quality. Dip in for a few seconds and Hudson River Wind Meditations sounds unremarkable. But let it play out and something magic happens. Soft rhythmic drones begin to interact in subtle, shifting patterns, and before you know it you’re locked in, being carried along on its current.

Hudson River Wind Meditations sounds like nothing else in Reed’s catalogue. But nor is it acomplete outlier. It shares some DNA with the music of La Monte Young, the minimalist composer who inspired The Velvet Underground, and whose Dream House installation still drones away in New York’s Tribeca district to this day. You could also see it as asort of sister release to Metal Machine Music –Reed’s squalling electric guitar feedback suite, which landed to abewildered reception on its release in 1975, but makes rather more sense today. “Most of you won’t like this and I don’t blame you at all,” Reed wrote in that album’s sleevenotes. “It’s not meant for you. At the very least Imade it so that Ihave something to listen to.”

He might have said the same about Hudson River Wind Meditations. When he began making this music, Reed never intended it for commercial release. Instead, these tracks –recorded, similarly to Metal Machine Music, at home, using afinely tuned set-up of keyboards, guitars and amplifiers –began life as Reed’s personal soundtrack to his yoga and Tai Chi practice. In the album’s sleevenotes, Reed’s yoga teacher Eddie Stern recalled how effective this music was at focusing the mind: “The sounds immediately drew you into an inner flow of awareness,” he explains. “Something was happening with the music, but at the same time something was happening inside of you.”