Cascade

As ever with William Basinski, Cascade is deeply melancholic and subdued, music to embrace in the deep of a sleepless night. But it also unfurls to reveal layers of brightness that went undetected on 92982, as the increased pace of the loops blurs and breaks apart the piece's monotonous (in the best sense of the word) repetition to reveal the deep humanity at the work's core.

The formula remains potent. [Aug 2015, p.71]

The piece is so gradual that when the curtain finally does fall the phantom of that piano loop lingers in the ears for long after.

On Cascade, he’s back to forestalling that knowledge through repetition, which is what gives his abstract pieces their surprising sentience and unaccountable melancholy. The machine is doing the work, but the composer has done the thinking and feeling, and that makes all the difference.

In Cascade the loop is repeated fairly cleanly, although the piano is drenched in a magical, woozy and slightly unsettling echo; while it is certainly quite relaxing and takes you on a wonderful eleven minute journey there is something oddly otherworldly and plaintive about the whole thing.

The standard comment about Mr. Basinski’s work is that its evocation of decay grips your emotions and reduces you to jelly, though I don’t get that so much from Cascade.