Album Reviews: William Basinski - The Deluge and Cascade

With the arrival of William Basinski's The Deluge in all of its 180 gram, limited edition, white vinyl glory, now is finally the time to both talk about this piece of music, as well as its companion “Cascade,” which was released earlier in the year.

But it’s also the time to talk about two other things—one of which is a topic that Stereogum tackled earlier this summer with a thinkpiece on “Peak Vinyl”; the other is what it means to really “get,” or rather, to appreciate an understand, ambient and experimental music.

To really appreciate a piece on instrumental ambient, experimental, or droning music, you have to really let it speak to you—you don’t have lyrics or a melody to guide you into the song. It’s like staring into an abyss and you have to trust that the piece in question is going to take you somewhere—you have to trust it, and in doing so, you have to open yourself up to its possibilities.

The best, and most successfully executed, pieces of music like this are also the most evocative: they either conjure up strong imagery simply by using sounds and tones that are scattered in no discernable verse/chorus/verse format; or, they pull an emotion, or a memory, out of you.

It’s something that writer Brian Howe seems to practically miss the point of on his piss take reviews of The Deluge and “Cascade” for Pitchfork—a piece that ran at the end of July. While he says some nice, complimentary things, he gets hung up on the structure of both pieces, as well as nitpicks on and erroneously discusses the sample from “Cascade” having possibly been used before on a piece from Basinski’s 92982.

Anyway…

Basinski is no stranger to evocative pieces of modern classical or ambient music. A household name thanks to his 5 hour Disintegration Loops series, he knows what he’s doing as he plays, and manipulates, simple loops of sounds, warbling them, causing them to echo and reverberate, hypnotizing you into the atmosphere he’s creating.

Clocking in at 40 minutes, “Cascade” does all that, and then some.

“Cascade” is built around a shimmering, entrancing sequence of piano loops and swells that slightly echo off into one another, aptly creating a cascading effect that you, as a listener, slowly drift away into.

And at 40 minutes in length—there reaches a certain point where you start to hear things that aren’t really within the song as you work your way through—it takes that much of a hold on you. Since this has been out for a minute, and I’ve been sitting on this review for a minute, I listened to “Cascade” a lot on my headphones on a trip I took in May. During the final leg of the trip, on a shuttle bus from the airport back to our town, there reached a certain point on the highway where I was confident that the pitch within the piece shifted ever so slightly, creating a strange pulling effect—and I could feel myself being pulled with it; like I felt a strange dropping within my stomach as I imagined this shift within the piece.

For those who may not understand how ambient music works, or how Basinski operates as a performer, creating a 20 minute companion piece, “The Deluge,” which runs the same sample through a different array of effects, may seem like it’s unnecessary.

Running half the length in duration, “The Deluge” muddies the clarity of the original piano loop, which wasn’t even very pristine to begin with. It also is where Basinski begins to fiddle with the amount of feedback the sample is creating in correlation with the delay timing. It’s here where “The Deluge” takes on a life of its own, continuing to play through, but on the verge of getting out of hand with the cacophony Basinski meticulously orchestrates through subtle adjustments.

Included on the b-side of The Deluge LP is a brief sound collage of sorts called “The Denouement,” which seems to begin with the sample that serves as the source material for both “Cascade” and “The Deluge,” before then shifting in to a brief orchestral flourish that is looped for a good portion of the track’s six minute running time, as an ominous drone slowly creeps in behind it, eventually getting louder and louder, though never overtaking things completely.

The b-side ends with a condensed, 11-minute version of “Cascade,” which removes the piece’s original low, disconcerting droning ending, and replaces it with a simple fade out—just as simply as it faded in.

“The Denouement” and the amended version of “Cascade” are interesting, but are pure ephemera—like the bonus features on a DVD that are for film buffs only.

As I had mentioned at the beginning, The Deluge is an opportunity to talk about a larger problem within the manufacturing end of things with in “the biz.”

Stereogum wrote a very longread recently on “peak vinyl,” and here’s the gist of it: the market is oversaturated with things being pressed onto vinyl, and that very fact is causing small labels, and even moderately good sized and reputable labels to encounter a number of problems getting something produced on time.

The Deluge is a prime example of this issue—announced in March as a “limited edition” release, pre-orders went live with an expected release date in May. May came and went, and the project was delayed for two months due to some kind of problem with the quality of the test pressing. It shifted the whole thing back to the very end of July.

Despite the frustrations they were very vocal about when pressed on social media, the label, Temporary Residence, was less than upfront about the time frame of the delays—only sending out one email well after the original release date had passed, and not offering any kind of update in the way of, “hey, these are really going out the last week of July, hope that’s cool.”

Also, choosing Media Mail as my method of shipping was a poor choice on my part, way back in March (dark ages, now, really) because my copy of The Deluge sat in some part of gentrified Brooklyn for five days before moving anywhere and took 10 days total to get to my mailbox.

I know. I know. First world problems. Kevin’s stupid drone record took too long to get to his house. Blah blah blah.

But “peak vinyl” is a real problem—it pushed the expected release date of Black Messiah on vinyl back two times I think, while Jack White is pressing Jay Z’s worst album as a double LP two years after its release, and things like the Pitch Perfect 2 soundtrack are now taking up space on wax, available to purchase at your local Barnes and Noble, one of the latest stores to hop onto the vinyl bandwagon.

“Peak vinyl” is a real problem for your wallet—shit gets expensive now because there is a market for, oh, seemingly every record ever released to be reissued on vinyl. FYE charges $34+ for almost everything they carry. And the sheer mass of things being released now has meant a real dip in quality—you can hear it even on things that are pressed on 180 gram; things just aren’t coming through as clear as they could be.

While my wife would have you think that “limited edition white vinyl” is part of the problem as well, here, there are no sound quality issues, thankfully.

Complaints about things that really don't matter in the end, because nothing does, aside: the full length “Cascade,” and the “The Deluge” are companion pieces to a larger whole that are both needed to be experienced as a soundtrack for looking within yourself—essential Basinski compositions, and exponentially more accessible and exciting than his last effort, Nocturnes.

The Deluge is, believe it or not, available now via Temporary Residence. "Cascade" is available as a compact disc from Basinski's own 2062 imprint.