This is a meditation both on sadness and the way we conjure it through music.

The black holes that feature on this album are 30 times the mass of our Sun, but they’re puny next to the universes Basinski conjures.

English and Basinski have run the gamut of literary references and the emotional spectrum.

A Shadow in Time makes a beautiful funeral procession for David Bowie.

A good entry point to the Basinski catalog.

Cascade lacks the surprise of Basinski's more adventurous sonic juxtapositions and modulations, remaining instead in the original groove and varying most by shifting dynamics.

[xrr rating=4.0/5]William Basinski has built a career out of ephemerality, or at least its illusion. Where once he traded in bare repetition, the release of the Disintegration Loops in the wake of 9/11 revitalized his career by focusing on the death of sound, decay and dust cluttering his post-2000 recordings. Melancholia, re-released this year by Temporary Residence Ltd., is perhaps …

"Working with tape loops is interesting is because you’re working with your fingers and a piece of plastic and scissors and scotch tape."

[xrr rating=3.5/5]That A Red Score in Tile took a somewhat circuitous route to reach us today is fairly obvious. Originally recorded in 1979, it was issued in 2004 in Germany and finally reissued via composer William Basinski’s 2062 label. Anyone familiar with Basinski’s work, particularly “Melancholia” or “The Garden of Brokenness,” will know the drill here: a roughly eight-note progression …

[xrr rating=4.5/5]The story of The Disintegration Loops is truly astonishing and key to understanding its significance as a work of art. In the summer of 2001, composer William Basinski decided to digitize a number of old analog tape loops found in a closet, in order to preserve them for his archives. These were tapes he made back in the 1980s …