Pitchfork

William Basinski's career doesn't follow a familiar arc. He's a trained clarinetist and saxophonist whose earliest sound art, committed to reel-to-reel in the late 1970s and the 1980s, stayed locked away for years as he established himself in New York City's art and music scene, doing multimedia work and some production, including work with Diamanda Galas. When his early work finally came to light, it brought him to broad acclaim, but what we were listening to wasn't actually that work-- it was that work warped and chaotically reshaped by time and the failures of human recording technology.

In a sense, it was almost like listening to Basinski's own memory of his pieces, with occasional gaps, misremembrances, and inadvertent reinventions. Hearing the tapes destroy themselves on the spindles was as important as hearing the snippets of ghostly piano on them in the first place. What makes most of it so listenable is that, unlike a great deal of process music, it's deeply emotional-- the little bits of music are simplistically haunting, using phrases that remind us of fragments of nursery rhymes or music box melodies.

Variations for Piano and Tape is the latest in Basinski's archival series and it's as simple as anything that came before it. The single piece, "Variation #9: Pantelleria", is just a stark five-note piano theme playing over and over for 44 minutes. Frankly, I'm a little unclear this time as to what in the transfer process caused all the other noises here on the recording. Ostensibly, it's the same short loop going round and round, but the tape occasionally slips from the head, leaving unpredictable gaps, and there's bleed from the other side of the tape. It also clips and echoes and gets periodically garbled by tape machine noise that swishes around like oily broth.

The permutations have the effect of expanding the theme from five notes to nine at several points-- this is apparently caused by the rhythmic slipping of the tape so that it plays part of the theme backward. For all its glitches and adherence to Basinski's melancholy, though, this is the least interesting of all his archival releases for me-- in no small part because the theme he employs is too melodic, and this calls attention to the repetition rather than serving it. It's still a beautiful reflection on the imperfection of memory, but it doesn't have the soul-rending impact of the Disintegration Loops or even this year's Garden of Brokenness.