‘Melancholia’, like its better known predecessor ‘The Disintegration Loops’, finds Basinski in 2003 re-working old, tape loop-recorded melodies that he made in the early ’80s and stored away for decades. According to myth, those loops crumbled away in the stage of processing as Basinski revisited and replayed their sashaying dust mite dances over the years.

What remains are the traces of Basinski coming to terms with the inevitable entropy of his work and, by extension, himself. It makes for a truly unforgettable and rewarding listening experience as his solo piano lines of thought dig deep into the recesses of nostalgia, evoking a rarified state of mind comparable to the effect of Claude Debussy or Erik Satie’s quiet elegance, but augmented from spectral ambient perspectives.