Record Rebound: Hear the final Lou Reed solo album on vinyl for the first time
In April 2007, Lou Reed, the founding leader of The Velvet Underground, released his 20th and final studio album, Hudson River Wind Meditations. The release markedly departed from Reed’s more associative conventional rock and experimental works. Unlike the gritty urban narratives of The Velvet Underground & Nico or the avant-garde stylings of Metal Machine Music, this album is a unique venture into ambient territory.
Comprising just three tracks, each exceeding the 15-minute mark, Hudson River Wind Meditations intends to subdue the anxious mind with its meditative soundscapes. The album reflected Reed’s connection to nature and identified his seldom-betrayed contemplative and introspective side.
As the name suggests, the music was inspired significantly by the Hudson River, which ran close to Reed’s home in East Hampton, New York. The soft, mostly synthesised sounds evoke the river’s vastness, the flowing of the water and the rushing of wind on the surface. These sounds take on a more poignant stature when one considers that, during Reed’s illness and eventual death from liver failure in 2013, he found comfort in meditation, Tai chi and the Hudson River’s serenity.
With this in mind, Hudson River Wind Meditations can be considered one of Reed’s most personal releases. “I first composed this music… to play in the background of life—to replace the everyday cacophony with new and ordered sounds of an unpredictable nature,” Reed wrote in a 2007 statement accompanying the album’s release.
“I guess by ‘life’, he meant something like what Brian Eno might mean—ambient music that colours the air in very interesting ways. For me, it resets my brainwaves,” Reed’s wife, artist Laurie Anderson, commented in a recent statement. “In Tibetan Buddhism teachings, heart and mind are the same word—citta—close to the chi of Tai Chi, which is pure energy. This music is pure energy; it breathes in and out. It’s not like here’s the beginning: dum da da! And now it develops, and now it ends! Rather, it’s one long loop that keeps changing in subtle ways.”
Reed produced Hudson River Wind Meditations alongside Hal Willner and is credited for taking the photograph featured in the album artwork. In 2007, the record was only released digitally, a disservice to Reed’s photography, which is to be rectified on Friday, January 12th, with the arrival of the album’s first physical issue.
Light in the Attic Records, Laurie Anderson and the Lou Reed Archive have collaborated to review this final offering from one of the 20th century’s most vital musical icons. Remastered by the Grammy-nominated engineer John Baldwin, the new double-LP set includes a gatefold sleeve designed by Masaki Koike featuring liner notes penned by Reed’s eminent yoga instructor and author, Eddie Stern. The physical copies also include a conversation recorded in 2023 between Anderson and journalist Jonathan Cott.
You can pre-order your copy of Hudson River Wind Meditations here.
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