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William Basinski and Janek Schaefer, “. . . on reflection” (Temporary Residence, 2022)

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There are several William Basinski albums that I absolutely love, but his various collaborations are rarely as compelling as his solo work (the leftfield Sparkle Division being a notable exception, of course). The fundamental issue is that Basinski’s finest moments tend to be an intimate distillation of a single theme to its absolute essence, which does not leave much room at all for anyone else to add something without dispelling the fragile magic. While it is unclear if Janek Schaefer is unusually attuned to Basinski’s wavelength or if the duo simply waited until the path to something lasting and beautiful organically revealed itself, I can confidently state that the pair ultimately wound up in exactly the right place regardless of how they got there.

If I did not understand and appreciate the sizeable challenges inherent in crafting a hypnotically satisfying and immersive album from a mere handful of notes, I would be amused that Basinski and Schaefer first began working on this album together all the way back in 2014 and that the entire 8-year process basically resulted in just two or three simple piano melodies. In fact, I am still a little amused by this album’s nearly decade-long gestation, but that does not make the result any less impressive. Significantly, ” . . . on reflection “ is dedicated to Harold Budd, but an even closer stylistic kindred spirit is Erik Satie (albeit a blearily impressionistic channeling of the visionary composer’s work rather than any kind of straight homage).

The opening “. . . on reflection (one)” lays out Basinski and Schaefer’s shared vision in gorgeously sublime fashion, as a simple and tenderly melancholy piano melody languorously and unpredictably flickers across a barely audible backdrop of room sounds. Naturally, things are deceptively far more complex than they initially seem though, as it soon sounds like two or loops of different lengths are all playing at once. A lingering haze of delay and decay gradually adds some muted streaks of color, but that is just icing on an already perfect cake, as I could listen to the melodies lazily intertwining forever. In a general sense, the piece calls to mind the delicate prettiness of a music box melody, but beautifully enhances that illusion with weighty emotional depth and seemingly endless variations in the shape and emphasis of the shifting patterns.

Significantly, an interest in Zen Buddhism helped lead Basinski to making The Disintegration Loops a few decades back and it feels like that influence directly or indirectly led to this album as well, as there is a very natural and liquid ebb and flow at work, as well as a meditative spaciousness: absolutely nothing here feels hurried, forced, or conspicuously manipulated. Obviously, that is a sneakily difficult effect to achieve without haplessly blundering into forgettable “ambient drift” territory. In fact, the following “. . . on reflection (two)” initially feels like exactly such a misstep, resembling an Erik Satie piece dissolved into hazy, twinkling impressionism. As it turns out, however, Basinski and Schaefer just chose a more slow-burning trajectory than usual, as it soon feels like I am blissfully floating through a three-dimensional dream space while constellations of piano lazily form and dissolve around me.

Unsurprisingly, the remaining three pieces can be described as variations on the same themes (“deploying a delicate piano passage from their collective archive, Basinski and Schaefer weave and reweave in numerous ways”), but it is one hell of a theme and the five pieces add up to quite an immersive, beautiful, and poignant song cycle. If I had to choose a favorite piece, I would go with “. . . on reflection (four)” solely on the grounds that it sounds almost exactly like the already great opener, yet stretches out even longer and is texturally enhanced by a helpful chorus of chirping nocturnal birds. If “more of the same, but longer” seems unambiguously welcome (if not actively enticing) to me, I feel quite comfortable in proclaiming . . . on reflection to be an ingeniously constructed minimalist masterpiece.   

Listen here.

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William Basinski, “Lamentations” (Temporary Residence, 2020)

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I suppose I am predisposed to enjoy any major new statement from William Basinski, given my undying love of both hypnotic repetition and tape loops, but I was still a bit blindsided by the dazzling heights he sometimes reaches with this latest opus. That said, the heart of Basinski’s vision remains mostly unchanged, as Lamentations is yet another album lovingly assembled from his seemingly bottomless archive of distressed tapes (“over forty years of mournful sighs meticulously crafted into songs”). The mood and structure this time around are fairly far from Basinski’s usual comfort zone, however, as these twelve eerie miniatures feel like a hallucinatory stroll through a haunted and rotting opera house.

Such an aesthetic is generally just fine by me (though not my favorite of Basinski’s album-length visions), yet Lamentations feels legitimately brilliant when it transcends mere mystery- and sadness-soaked ambiance, as it does on the swooningly operatic centerpiece “Please, This Shit Has Got To Stop.” With that piece, Basinski attains a level of heavenly melodicism and emotional intensity that I have not encountered in any of his previous work. The rest of the album, on the other hand, generally feels like an atypically murky, brooding, and subtly nightmarish twist on his usual loops of ravaged tape. However, there are also a few second-tier highlights like the swooningly angelic “All These Too, I, I Love” or “O, My Daughter, O, My Sorrow,” which approximates the strains of a great This Mortal Coil song drifting through a supernatural fog. 

As such, Lamentations lies somewhere between a somewhat uneven album and a significant creative breakthrough. For now, Basinski has not fully mastered how to craft short loop-driven compositions as consistently mesmerizing as his classic longform work, but I suspect he will get there soon: adding chopped classical vocalists to his arsenal was definitely a welcome and wonderful flash of inspiration. More importantly, “Please, This Shit Has Got To Stop” may very well be the finest piece that he has ever released. While I suspect I could happily listen to variations of El Camino Real or 92982 forever, I am absolutely delighted that there are still some fresh ideas lurking in all those decaying tapes.

Samples can be found here.

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William Basinski, “On Time Out of Time” (Temporary Residence, 2019)

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This latest release is more of a diversion than a fresh addition to the canon of William Basinski masterworks, as it was originally composed for a pair of installations for an exhibition in Berlin. In keeping with theme of the show (“Limits of Knowing”), he stepped outside of his usual working methods to craft floating ambient soundscapes sourced from recordings captured by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Looked at another way, however, On Time Out of Time could be seen as Basinski’s normal working methods taken to their ultimate extreme: instead of harvesting sounds from decaying tapes a few decades old, he is now harvesting billion-year-old sounds created by merging black holes. 

As far as singular, awe-inspiring cosmic events go, that is fairly hard to top, but it must be said that Basinski on his own has a more melodically and harmonically sophisticated sensibility than most (if not all) black holes. As such, the appeal of On Time Out Of Time lies more in the ingenious transformation of the source material than in the finished compositions (though they are quite likable).

It might be hyperbole to describe it as a golden age, but there was a ten-year stretch that began in the mid-’80s in which Steve Roach, Vidna Obmana, Alio Die, and a few other artists churned out an impressive run of sublime ambient albums. Unusually for a William Basinski release, On Time Out of Time feels like a part of that tradition, albeit the more star-gazing side rather than the tribal/ritualistic side (for obvious reasons, in this case). That is not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, but it feels like odd territory for Basinski’s work to bleed into, as he always seemed more like an art scene guy with considerably different influences than most ambient artists. 

That stylistic tourism is most evident in the album’s epic title piece, though Basinski’s take on space music is an appealingly bleary and impressionistic one. That trait only becomes fully apparent with focused, attentive listening though, as “On Time Out of Time” feels mostly like a time-stretched state of suspended animation, as cold, spectral smears of sound languorously wax and wane to form a shifting haze of vaguely disquieting harmonies. It reminds me of the way a ray of sunlight can sometimes reveal an unseen world of floating dust particles. It would be reductive to say that the piece is merely a vaporous, dreamlike reverie though—it just happens to have an extremely subtle and slow-building arc, quietly blossoming into occasional passages of undulating warmth or darkly lysergic crescendos of blurred dissonance. In general, however, the trajectory is always moving steadily towards greater warmth, culminating in a tenderly lovely final stretch of heavenly chords that dissolves into hissing, clicking near-silence.

The album’s considerably shorter second piece (“4(E+D)4(ER=EPR)”) is quite a bit different though, returning to more recognizably structured and loop-based territory. As such, it is by far the more instantly gratifying of the two, which is an unfortunate irony: the title piece was clearly the more ambitious and difficult undertaking by a wide margin. By comparison, “4(E+D)4(ER=EPR)” is far more modest in scope, as the ringing deep space transmissions are quickly consumed by a see-sawing pattern of lush, soft-focus chords. 

While “two alternating chords, endlessly repeated” is theoretically not the strongest theme for a ten-minute composition, Basinski has made a career out of turning the simplest fragments into something poignant and mesmerizing and he does an impressive job of pulling off that feat yet again here. As with the title piece, the magic lies in the details, as there is a swirling, howling, and glimmering storm at the heart of “4(E+D)4(ER=EPR)” that fleetingly breaks through the spaces between the warm chords. The main reason that it works better is simply because there is a consistent pulse to anchor the piece and give it a sense of forward motion (even if it is illusory, as the title track is the one that actually undergoes a significant transformation).

I often have mixed feelings about Basinski’s albums that depart from his signature aesthetic of deteriorating tape loops, as he discovered and mastered an ingenious compositional tool that has yielded some absolutely beautiful work .I imagine attempting to compose similarly stellar albums while pointedly avoiding one’s greatest strength is a tricky proposition, but endlessly doing the same thing is doubtlessly a depressing one. It is definitely a balancing act. And as a fairly passionate William Basinski fan, I always feel a bit like a boorish audience member shouting at a brilliant magician to keep doing my favorite trick over and over again whenever I have a lukewarm reaction to something new that he tries. I am still genuinely delighted that he keeps exploring new options though, as taking chances and disrupting familiar working methods is what keeps art fresh and compelling. 

As far as this particular experiment is concerned, On Time Out of Time is a solid album, but it falls short of being one of Basinski’s more essential works simply because it sounds exactly like what it was meant to be:the soundtrack to a larger, more complete work. Admittedly, “4(E+D)4(ER=EPR)” stands quite well on its own, but it is a bit too brief to fully immerse me. In any case, On Time Out of Time is best appreciated as a headphone album, as its most exquisite pleasures are nuanced, slowly unfolding ones that reveal themselves only with deep listening. Aside from the source material, that is probably the trait that most makes this a significant and unique addition to Basinski’s oeuvre.

Samples can be found here.
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William Basinski, “A Shadow in Time” (Temporary Residence, 2017)

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Few current artists are as consistent and reliably absorbing as William Basinski, as he has carved a wonderful career out of conjuring work of hypnotic beauty from simple, well-chosen snippets from his backlog of decaying tapes. It is not nearly as simple a formula as it sounds, but Basinski always manages to make it look effortless anyway. Recently, however, he seems to have become a bit restless with that aesthetic, as he transformed the more traditionally Basinski-esque The Cascade into The Deluge with the aid of some feedback loops of varying lengths. A Shadow in Time is an even more radical leap forward, as the title piece feels like a pile-up of blurred tape loops woven into a vibrantly shifting composition. The other piece, Basinski’s gorgeous tribute to David Bowie, is admittedly a bit less adventurous in structure, but is not devoid of unexpected twists either.

The opening “A Shadow in Time” does not waste any time at all in establishing that Basinski has some new ideas to share, as the murkily pulsing synth drones are quickly embellished with a series of very composed-sounding swells of ghostly sounding feedback or harmonics. Also, the underlying drones gradually accumulate additional layers, additional density, and some subtly dissonant and grinding metallic textures, so it is almost instantly impossible to tell how many loops are involved, how long they are, and how much of the piece is not culled from loops at all. If Basinski played anything in real-time (and it seems he did), he certainly did an admirable job in making it sound every bit as gauzy and distressed as his old tapes. 

Also of note: the piece feels quite a bit more amorphous than a lot of Basinski’s work, as there is no immediately graspable melody or satisfying chord progression amidst the swirling ocean of drones and tape hiss. Normally, a conspicuous lack of structure or hooks would be a bad thing, but “Shadow” actually represents a bold step forward compositionally, as the harsher, grinding textures give the piece an ominous sense of menace to hold my attention while a dark and shifting undercurrent sneakily takes form. 

As such, it is definitely not one of Basinski’s more immediately gratifying pieces, but it gradually revealed itself to be quite subtle, heavy, and ingenious once I listened to it enough for everything to fully sink in. While the comparatively placid fade-out perhaps overstays its welcome a bit, the best parts of “Shadow” feel like a sinister black cloud billowing up through a deceptively calm sea.

“For David Robert Jones” on the other hand, initially feels like business as usual, as a warm and dreamlike loop endlessly repeats with minimal embellishment. In fact, it is not unlike the gorgeous melancholy of Basinski’s classic 92982 album, resembling a blurred and gently hallucinatory choral mass. That is probably the side of Basinski’s artistry that I love the best, but “For David Robert Jones” unexpectedly develops into something a bit more than a heavenly, “locked groove” elegy, as something that sounds like a tape-distressed saxophone hook erupts from the bliss-fog about a third of the way through the piece. 

The delayed introduction of a bold new motif is not a common Basinski trope at all, so it makes for a comparatively vibrant splash of color and nicely deepens the emotional richness of the piece. While that turns out to be the final significant surprise that Basinski has up his sleeve for the album, he makes the interesting choice of juxtaposing the beginning of that hook with a repeating wrong-sounding note. Weirdly, that one sour note is what elevates the piece into something truly special for me, as a slightly curdled version of lush melancholia is considerably more intriguing and mysterious than pure sonic heaven with no sharp edges to watch out for.

As an album, A Shadow in Time has a lot going for it and certainly claims a place among Basinski’s stronger releases. First and foremost, “For David Robert Jones” is easily one of the most beautiful pieces that he has ever recorded. The title piece is not quite on the same level, but it is no less significant. While my deep appreciation for William Basinski’s work is well-documented, it is not an unconditional love—he can only explore variations of familiar themes so many times before they start to yield diminishing returns for me (and presumably for him as well), so it is encouraging to see a promising step in a different direction. 

I have no idea if “A Shadow in Time” represents the way forward for Basinski, but I am definitely eager to see where it leads. In the meantime, it is refreshing to hear something outside the norm and an unexpected treat to see Basinski in more overt “composer” mode. Given that his treasure trove of damaged tapes turned out to be such career-defining, once-in-a-lifetime lightning bolt of inspiration, it is far too easy to forget that Basinski is more than someone with limitless patience and a golden ear: he was a gifted musician and composer long before The Disintegration Loops changed everything for him and that person has not gone anywhere.

Listen here.

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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, “Melancholia” (Temporary Residence, 2014)

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Newly released on vinyl for the first time (now with actual cover art!), this aptly titled 2003 album shares a surprising amount of common ground with last year’s Nocturnes. The key difference is that Melancholia is broken up into 14 discrete quasi-impressionist piano vignettes. While history has shown that Basinski is primarily at his best with more longform work, this is still a likable and somewhat fascinating effort that occasionally offers up a few rather unique sci-fi-meets-Claude-Debussy moments.

Like many of William’s releases, Melancholia has its roots in tapes that he made in the ’80s, though its neo-classical feel is quite a bit different from most of the other Basinski albums that I have heard. That classical bent is most pronounced in the extremely similar Parts I and IX, which combine a brief snatch of sadly descending piano with mournful bowed strings and something that sounds like a heavily reverbed and warped recording of a birdsong. 

Aside from being almost interchangeable in every way, the two pieces are noteworthy for highlighting Melancholia‘s most bizarre feature: it is quite possible that this entire album was spawned from less than a minute of recorded music. Many motifs repeat themselves, each piece is built upon just one repeating theme, and few of William’s loops ever last longer than 5 or 10 seconds.

For me, that is what makes Melancholia a compelling release: it is not nearly as absorbing or hypnotic as his later work, but William inventively makes a lot of something out of virtually nothing, even if it does all feel like a series of sketches. Admittedly, the best pieces are probably the aforementioned two Debussy-meets-howling-space-monkey works, as they sound like nothing else that I have heard. However, a number of other pieces offer significant rewards if listened to closely enough, particularly Part VIII, which obliterates anything recognizably piano-like to leave only a shimmering, crackling, and undulating haze. Several other pieces perform similar feats with a fair amount of success, such as Part II, which enhances its languorous melody with a ghostly afterimage.

Despite all those appealing traits, Melancholia is definitely not one of William’s stronger efforts, primarily because it seems like Basinski is recycling so many of his ideas without going anywhere particularly fresh with them: a number of pieces seem virtually identical to one another. Also, as mentioned earlier, William’s particular strain of genius tends to only be apparent when he allows himself plenty of time to stretch out. The far more recent “Nocturnes” is the most illuminating comparison in this case, as Basinski takes a similarly brief and basic piano theme and stretches it into 40-minutes of subtly shifting, mesmerizing beauty. 

On Melancholia, William was clearly still trying to figure out the possibilities of that approach, keeping his experiments quite short. While it is still an enjoyable album and an interesting window into Basinski’s evolution, Melancholia is probably only worth investigating for those who have already plunged into his major albums and crave still more.

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.