This one can't be reviewed quite like other albums; it's as much about the process of making the music as the music itself. This thing is nearly five hours, by far the longest album on this list, with the opening track alone lasting over an hour. And it's a five-second loop of an (admittedly gorgeous) electronic melody, repeated over and over again. The rest of the tracks follow the same pattern. Basinski was transferring these loops, most of which were close to fifteen years old, to tape when he realized the tape was disintegrating as he was making the transfer. The music
itself is dying as you listen to it. Loops drop out and become distorted, change, fill with static, collapse to nothingness. This is a work of art in which music and concept are so utterly intertwined they could not be separated without killing both, like Siamese twins. It's profound, it's boring. It is not "music" in the conventional sense; its progression (or regression, I suppose) comes not from the aesthetics of any human being but from the randomness of a dying machine, the natural destructiveness of nature. It's half-music. But how much can any of us say we control ourselves? Perhaps Basinski is simply being more honest here, but coming right out and saying exactly how it was chance and nature, and not his own mind, that constructed this music. How strange that what is probably the simplest album on this list, musically, conceals the profoundest depths.
MY RATING:
9.6
William Basinski - "D | P 1.1 (excerpt)"
(note: of all the albums on this list, this one is probably the least effectively served by a sample. It really should be experienced in full, or it won't make much sense. Trust me, it's worth it.)
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