Master the manipulation of dusty cassettes and an artist runs the risk of never affecting another soul on this planet. Alternatively, the same artist's craft becomes so untouchable that not a critic can be found who doesn’t begrudgingly love what by all means should be unloveable. William Basinski has for some time now served as the Orson Welles of the experimental audio movement. The man’s knack for turning his own forgotten tape loop recordings of decades past into a nourishing brand of ambient music is as eerie as the loops themselves.

Basinski’s mode of operation is one of the more mysterious of our time. As an artist he was virtually unknown until the release of the four volumes of The Disintegration Loops from 2002-2003. The mere story of their creation was at once so haunting and gorgeous that it vaulted Basinski to cult legend status worldwide, almost overnight. The idea of a man slowly amassing a cache of decaying reel-to-reel and cassette samples, whose only audience is a small musical elite in New York City,  suddenly becoming a scion of twenty-first century avant-garde music when his works are released decades later—this is truth stranger than fiction. The sounds considered individually are languid and cumbersome, and they would be of no interest had Basinski not created his method of warping and rerecording these mundane loops into something haunting and ethereal.

What truly distinguishes Basinski’s work from any other artist is the way in which its very nature delineates the passage of time. Few people with an appreciation for the genre fail to be impressed by the Disintegration Loops, if not by the aesthetic value of the sounds themselves then by the harsh biodegradation they represent. That work reminds the listener that things are constantly being broken down and aged, whether one looks at them for twenty years or not, and as biological matter, so are we. Last year’s highly regarded 92892 introduced variety into Basinski’s general formula. Rather than focus on the way in which his archives were being subjugated by time, he showcased their ability to calmly combine a diverse palette into one wavering act of subtle triumph after another. Found sounds of street noise and the overhead flight of aircraft subconciously melt into the artist’s trademark hymn: a link between what the listener feels and Basinski’s notion of the present tense.

If The Disintegration Loops were a devastating reminder of time’s passage and 92892 was his modern assuagement, then Vivian & Ondine ushers in Basinski’s attempt at the circumvention of time altogether. The record’s title shares another of the artist’s hauntingly suave backstories. Shortly after giving his best regards to two separate pregnant mothers in his family, he created this work as a tribute to their future progeny. The morning after the work’s first public performance, the children Vivian and Ondine were coincidentally brought into the world. Again, truth stranger than fiction. Yet the story is relevant, representing a forty-five minute soundscape that seems as comforting as the womb. Basinski’s child is this beautifully sad repetition that lasts nearly an hour but could hold the listener forever. His signature ebb-and-tide sound doesn’t degrade now and never falters. It doesn’t change, not once. Instead it comfortingly wraps the mind in a swaddling cloth of hallowed shapeless synth. This is Basinski’s testament to life about to bloom and to life about to continue. It does much more than a repetitive sound loop should be able to do: it dismisses the notion of time altogether.

-Brendan Kraft