A Shadow in Time

Basinski has proven remarkably capable at existing far outside of his own legacy, his uncanny ability to wring entire worlds from his famously deep tape archives proving more remarkable with each subsequent release. A Shadow In Time is no exception. [No. 139, p.53]

William Basinski has created yet another outstanding work of art with A Shadow in Time, an audio sculpture of serenity and bliss to begin 2017 and put what was a saddening year for music to bed.

Basinski’s work, like all ambient music, provides for endless, unresolved interpretation by its design--even when it tries to force its meaning on you.

While the Bowie tribute will probably garner most attention--hey, at least it saves Basinski having to explain the story behind Disintegration Loops again--for me, “A Shadow In Time” is the more absorbing work. [Feb 2017, p.44]

Basinski brings to his craft an understanding that music structures time just as much as time structures music. Among his most entrancing work.

Like The Disintegration Loops, A Shadow in Time is not sentimental--it just is. Basinski’s music exists to make us feel, but won’t take the easy route in doing so.

Its [The second track's] eerily distorted saxophone, a nod to Low, takes six minutes to surface, but then takes centre stage, a mournful motif subtly evolving over the next quarter of an hour. The multilayered title track, meanwhile, is a less immediate drone, but proves hypnotic well within its 17-minute timeframe.

With pleasing inevitability, A Shadow In Time does not disappoint. [Mar 2017, p.25]

Even without knowing anything about Basinski himself or the climate in which he’s created his work, the listener herself would still be able to create their own world around it, such is the power of his music.

On A Shadow In Time, Basinski tries not merely to locate Bowie’s ghost in the machine, but to find its cross-dressing, orange-haired, anisocoric-eyed soul locked somewhere inside the hard electronic casing of the world.

By comparison, “A Shadow in Time” is atmospheric, cohesive, and less discernably a loop. Its fogginess and amorphous instrumentation brings to mind a long, somber walk through thick and uneven woods, or a slow submergence into the sea; the strings seem like wisps of wind, the synths like sluggish sands, and the sound effects imitate light pinging off glass.

While this sense of riveting discovery isn’t fully achieved on “For David,” the album nonetheless offers a stunning journey into a vast, ink-black void.