400 Lonely Things
Mother Moon
This album from 400 Lonely Things, produced by William Basinski, is a dark ambient, sample-based séance to the Banning Mill - a real-life decaying "mansion" and haven for artists, freaks and misfits in the backwoods of the American Deep South in the 1970s-1990s - and an extraordinary piece of art that lived there. An archaeological excursion in found sound - wandering through the art and memory of a real place, 'Mother Moon' is an origin story for 400 Lonely Things. In the '90s, Craig Varian was fortunate enough to frequent the Mill in the years before it closed. It was here that he was exposed to the artwork of Richard Scott Hill, whose artwork 'Minotauress' graces the album cover. His work both captured and fed into the Mill's sinister yet playful undercurrents of mania and depression. This album, born out of that first visit to the Mill, is an imaginary soundtrack to the many years of solitude the Minotauress spent hanging in the musty, secret winding halls of Banning Mill. Since the days of the Mill (and Varian's subsequent purchase of 'Minotauress' shortly before the Mill closed), Craig Varian, along with best friend and late musical partner Jonathan McCall, found a thread of music they'd been consistently making yet had previously failed to notice - melancholic instrumentals with weathered sampling at its core - going back to their earliest recordings in the late 1980's. Eventually, this music was called 400 Lonely Things.