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William Basinski, “The Deluge” (Temporary Residence/2062, 2015)

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Given how much I loved Cascade, my curiosity about this more ambitious companion album made for quite an impatient month of anticipation. Unfortunately, now that The Deluge has finally arrived, I do not know quite what to make of it. My initial gut feeling was that Basinski’s added intervention diluted a piece that was already perfect and complete, but it has since grown on me quite a bit with repeated listens. While I still feel that Cascade is the superior album, The Deluge mostly balances out its flaws with some higher high points than its predecessor. Also, it will likely hold a lot of appeal for anyone who has always wanted to love William Basinski, but wished he were more dynamic (though I personally prefer him as just an invisible guiding presence).

Unsurprisingly, The Deluge sounds almost exactly like Cascade when it begins, as it is constructed from the same brief, bittersweet, and endlessly looping piano motif. The only noticeable difference is that it feels a bit like it is being played on a somewhat wobbly and erratic tape player this time around. Gradually, however, Basinski’s numerous, varying-length feedback loops begin to make their impact more and more prominent and the piece begins to take on a bleary, smeared, and after-image-heavy identity of its own. 

That said, it still takes some time before it becomes fully evident why Basinski and Temporary Residence thought The Deluge warranted its own album. For me, that point comes around the 8:40 mark, when ghost-like shuddering swells start to surface from the melancholy haze of fragile piano. While that particular feat of illusion does not stick around for very long, it is more than enough to justify this album’s existence, as it is completely unexpected, weirdly natural-seeming, and eerily beautiful, as if the tape loop finally became worn down enough to set free the dark, buried secret fluttering beneath the notes.

About ten minutes later, The Deluge offers up yet another surprise, as the delicate piano theme slowly fades away to be replaced by a stuttering and overlapping new piano motif. Again, however, that transformation is short-lived, as The Deluge then surges into an obsessively repeating orchestral crescendo before fading into a single undulating drone. That might seem like a logical ending point, but the piece resurfaces yet again—sort of, anyways: the last ten minutes are an unadultered reprise of the Cascade album (part of it, at least).

There is definitely a lot to like about The Deluge, as Basinski’s transformative use of feedback loops managed to extract an added layer of mysterious beauty from a piece that was already one of my favorites. Also, the orchestral passages are a bit of an unexpectedly playful, yet darkly evocative new facet to Basinski’s aesthetic. If it had been perfectly executed, I would place The Deluge near the top of Basinski’s discography, but it regrettably has some quirks that take it down a few pegs.

The first is a huge peeve of mine: releasing pieces on vinyl that are too long to fit on one side of an album. To his credit, Basinski at least found a logical stopping point, as the first side feels like its own complete piece (the opening piano loop fades out 20 minutes after it started). The problem is that that is not the end of the piece, as the remaining movement kicks off the second side and feels like something new altogether. Also, there are some odd transitions and a feeling of being condensed as well—I did not like Basinski’s tendency to always fade into silence between motifs, nor was I thrilled about how the appended version of Cascade lasted only ten minutes, as duration was an extremely important part of the original Cascade‘s power. 

Ultimately, I still think The Deluge is a great album, but I cannot escape the exasperating irony that Basinski’s successful attempt to expand his scope as a composer coincides with the unfortunate decision to compose specifically for the media most ill-suited for its presentation.

Listen here.

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William Basinski, “Cascade” (2062, 2015)

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This is simultaneously a highly unusual and an extremely representative addition to William Basinski‚Äôs impressive discography: on one hand, it is yet another composition characteristically built upon a single brief and decaying tape loop, but it is also a comparatively unadulterated and “raw” prelude to the forthcoming Deluge album. Both albums are built from the same tape snippet, but Deluge feeds its simple piano motif through a series of varying feedback loops. On Cascade, that motif is simply allowed to endlessly repeat into rippling, hypnotic perfection without intervention.

The artistry of William Basinski is certainly a curious thing, as he has achieved an enormous amount of mileage out of very little actual musical content. Cascade is a prime example of that enigmatic alchemy, as it is a 40-minute album made from roughly a 10-second snippet of delicately melancholy piano. And, of course, it is highly likely that the snippet in question was actually recorded more than 30 years ago. 

It took me a very long time to warm to that aesthetic—I loved the first Disintegration Loops album, but the flood of similar albums in its wake bordered on the absurd and made me wonder if Basinski was actually some kind of charlatan who found a way to make a viable career out of endlessly regurgitating forgotten studio scraps. Over the last few years, however, I have gradually come to embrace Basinski as some kind of Zen genius/purist visionary. He is definitely not an infallible one, but when he hits the mark, he achieves a kind of perfect, simple beauty that cannot be found elsewhere.

Cascade is an album where Basinski most definitely hits the mark: it never changes or evolves, it just blearily, hauntingly, and endlessly ripples and shimmers and it is wonderful. Part of that magic is undeniably due to the elegant, bittersweet melody of the loop itself, as there is a definite artistry in isolating a poignant snatch of music that can be compellingly repeated forever (seemingly, anyway). 

A greater part of Cascade‘s success, however, is due to Basinski’s treatment of that loop, as its liquid-y reverb forms an increasingly complex after-image of subtle overtones, harmonies, and gentle oscillations. I suspect tape decay deserves a lot of credit as well for its murky and hissing enhancement of Basinski’s dreamweb. That might seem a somewhat obvious intersection of simple acts, but the cumulative effect is a deceptively powerful one: Cascade does not feel at all like the work of a human—it feels like some kind of organic, otherworldly, and self-sustaining sonic organism slowly drifting through some imaginary space. 

Sadly, I cannot think of a catchy name for such a genre, but whatever it is, Basinski certainly has it locked the hell down quite definitively. To my ears, Cascade is a flawless distillation of everything that William Basinski excels at. Consequently, I am very eager to hear what Deluge does with this base material, as it seems destined to either transform a minor masterpiece into a major one or to unwittingly break its fragile spell with too much added artifice. I am nervously hoping for the former.

Listen here.

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William Basinski, “Nocturnes” (2062, 2013)

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I have historically had a very complicated relationship with William Basinski’s work, as he has released some absolutely brilliant albums over the years, but he has also proven himself just as capable of producing fairly forgettable ambient music and/or flogging a single simple motif to death for a seeming eternity. This latest effort lies somewhere in the middle of those two poles, as the blurred, uneasy title piece favorably calls to mind a more hallucinatory Morton Feldman, while the closing “The Trail of Tears” gradually devolves into an especially cold, dull, and dreary strain of dark ambiance that is best avoided.

I will never understand the bizarre alchemy that takes place, but it seems like almost all of Basinski’s best work seems to result when he revisits and reworks recordings that he originally made 20 or 30 years ago. “Nocturnes” is the latest such work in that vein, as it is built from a hyper-minimal tape and prepared piano composition from William’s “San Francisco period” of 1979 to 1980 (I will ignore the fact that it is funny to attribute roughly 8 notes to a year-long period in one’s life).

The piece’s sole motif is quite a simple and bleak one, consisting entirely of a sad, skeletal descending piano melody and a couple of repeating chords, but Basinski somehow transforms it into something much weirder and deeper with his tapes: the notes all sound hazy, warped, and decayed and a queasy after-image trails behind each one. Other than that, seemingly not much happens until the halfway mark (roughly 20 minutes in), at which point an insistent low whine joins the fray, making it sound like even the tape player is falling apart. That turns out to be the piece’s crescendo (of sorts) and it unfolds for quite some time, before gradually fading away to leave only the original motif. If it were any shorter, it probably would not work nearly as well, but at just over 40 minutes, I had plenty of time to become fully mesmerized by its languorous spell.

Curiously, the more recent “The Trail of Tears” (2009) is much shorter and contains more themes, but feels comparatively uninspired and interminable. It begins with some promise, however, as a somber, almost moaning melody repeats amidst a bleary haze. Unfortunately, the haze gradually consumes the melody completely, leaving only a long stretch of forlorn-sounding murk with only some buried vestiges of the previous melody remaining. Later, a different motif appears that sounds like a glacially slowed-down and pitch-shifted cello ensemble playing at the bottom of a deep cavern.

Aesthetically, it seems to inhabit a stylistic gray area somewhere between early Caretaker (at best) and some of Cold Meat Industries’ most unapologetically gloomy ambient releases (at worst). I suppose that appeals to some people (like Robert Wilson, who borrowed an excerpt from this piece for his opera The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic), but I found it quite dull and dour for an artist with a history of more compelling work. In Basinski’s defense, I grant that the piece’s floating emptiness was an aesthetic choice rather than a failure, but other people have covered that territory quite thoroughly already. I will not necessarily say they covered it better, but that is solely because music in that vein all sounds the same to me.

Within the context of Basinski’s discography, I would describe Nocturnes as a solid “second tier” release: not nearly as canonical as some of his other albums (92982, El Camino Real, The Disintegration Loops, etc.), but still quite a fine album in its own right if I pretend that “The Trail of Tears” is merely a bonus track (which is exactly what I intend to do). 

It is very easy to be hard on Basinski given his stature and my corresponding expectations, as the cynical part of me cannot help but note that Nocturnes sounds like it could have been realistically bashed out on a laptop in a single afternoon. However, there is a definite artistry in surrendering the ego and letting go when something so simple sounds so perfect : anyone can loop a few piano notes for forty minutes, but it takes real vision to actually do it and have it come out sounding like some sort of spectral, rippling nightmare.

Listen here.