William Basinski - The Deluge LP

Label: Temporary Residence Ltd.

Our Review:

The Deluge is one of two variations on the same set of tape loops constructed by William Basinski. This body of work being released on vinyl, with a Cascade emerging in a different composition for CD release. Piano and orchestral recordings are the source material embedded onto those tapes, which Basinski colors with the muddled patina of a fictionalized antiquity. It's same deliciously haunted atmosphere that he's produced ever since he released the seminal Disintegration Loops nearly back in 2002. We'd love to believe that he stumbled up a pile of quarter-inch tape from some closet in a forgotten school who had a music program sometime in the '50s and '60s, whose students were only instructed on playing the most elegiac of funeral dirges on the piano. Or at least that's what Basinski's antiquated sounds allude to. It's a soft, contemplative, dreamy composition, all the while keeping true to his woozy melancholia traced with delay, echo, reverb, and drone. So fucking what if we've already heard Basinski present this same technique on every preceding recording? It remains always unnervingly beautiful and spellbinding!