Lou Reed’s ‘Hudson River Wind Meditations’ to get first vinyl release

Lou Reed’s final solo album, ‘Hudson River Wind Meditations’, will be getting its first vinyl release in January. 

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‘Hudson River Wind Meditations’, originally released in 2007, is a collection of ambient and drone recordings from the late Velvet Underground frontman, and was his last solo studio album.

Helmed by Seattle independent label Light In The Attic, in conjunction with the Lou Reed Archive and Reed’s wife, Laurie Anderson, the vinyl release marks the album’s first-ever, and is scheduled to drop on January 12. The album is not currently available on streaming platforms.

The package comes with remastered audio, liner notes from yoga instructor Eddie Stern, and an unreleased interview with Anderson. Deluxe versions of the vinyl will also come with five 8×10 photographs of New York City’s Hudson River by Reed himself.

In the album’s original liner notes, Reed wrote: “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.”

In a statement for the re-release, Anderson elaborated further: “I guess by ‘life,’ he meant something like what Brian Eno might mean–ambient music that colors the air in very interesting ways. For me, it resets my brainwaves.”

“In Tibetan Buddhism teachings, heart and mind are the same word – citta – close to the chi of Tai Chi, which is pure energy,” she added. “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.”

The vinyl release of ‘Hudson River Wind Meditations’ is the second work of Reed’s to be reissued this year. In February, his fourth album with The Velvet Underground, ‘Loaded’, received a limited-edition re-release as a nine-LP box set containing stereo, mono and “full-length” mixes of the album alongside demos, outtakes and live recordings.

While ‘Hudson River Wind Meditations’ was Reed’s last solo album, he later collaborated with Metallica on their 2011 joint full-length, ‘Lulu’. The divisive album garnered such strong reactions from listeners, that Reed once expressed that Metallica fans “have threatened to shoot [him]” because of it.

Nonetheless, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich has recently doubled down on the effort, writing in a posthumously released book by Reed: “I can’t quite figure it out, but years later, it’s aged extremely well. It sounds like a motherfucker still. So I can only put the reaction down to ignorance.”

In the past, Ulrich described his band’s experience working with the Velvet Underground legend as positive, maintaining that he “wouldn’t change a thing” about it.