Pitchfork

Unless you bought the original LP-only issue of Shortwave Music, released on Germany's Raster-Noton in 1997, there's a good chance you've never heard Muzak like this. Even then, Shortwave Music wasn't new-- it comprises recordings made all the way back in 1982 by William Basinski, during an especially prolific phase of musical experimentation that generated an archive that sat dormant until the last ten years, when the multimedia artist's release schedule has suddenly become quite busy. All of that work involved looped sound in one way or another, and this is no exception.

By 1982, Basinski had already created most of the great stockpile of loops that have brought him recent acclaim, and seeking a new source of sounds, he turned to radio. He sampled short phrases of Muzak and slowed them down until they were unrecognizable, drifting ghosts of themselves. The samples were then looped at varying lengths and combined two at a time with the crunchy surface texture of shortwave broadcasts. The pieces of music that result are tense, droning and dissonant to the point that they barely qualify as ambient-- you really can't help noticing them (my wife certainly does, and they drive her nuts).

If you followed Basinski's releases on Raster-Noton, you've already heard the fullest realization of this approach on The River, one of Basinski's defining works. If you haven't started listening to him yet, I'd recommend hearing that before taking in the five tracks compiled here, as it's the most impressive of his shortwave works yet released. This is the experimentation that lead him there, and it's for listeners who want a deeper understanding of the process and the sound.

There are two main points of dynamic tension in the music: the shifting of the main musical phrases as two loops of varying length repeat out of sync, and the random rise and fall of shortwave static set against the two steady loops. The best of the five pieces here ("Particle Showers" is a bonus track not on the original LP) is the 23-minute "On a Frontier of Wires", which really lets you marinate in the technique. One of the loops is also an especially intriguing phrase that sounds like it's searching its way through the soup of static and reverb.

The other pieces are shorter, though no more direct. "Evening Scars" is perhaps the most interesting texturally, the way it takes place in extremely low registers and is built off of eerie loops that convey an underwater feeling. Basinski has carved out an unmistakable sound, and though he's walking familiar ground here, it's a beautiful and striking place to return to.