[rayword45]

Day 73: El Camino Real by William Basinski (Album Choice: choof)

This review is 5 days and 4 listens long.

12/16/14 11:00 P.M EST - "Shit I gotta start and finish this math project. What's some good music? Oh, Basinski!"

*10 minutes in*

"Hey this is a pretty good loop. Maybe I'll visualize some cool stuff if I close my eyes" and that's why I won the moron of the year award. Got 100% on the project anyways though, it took 20 morning minutes.

12/18/14 1:00 A.M EST - "SHIT I gotta study for this AP Biology test, and this Precalculus test, and this blahdeblahblah show me the music!"

30 minutes later I fall asleep.

12/19/14 11:30 P.M EST - "Yeah let's just put this on while I go to bed"

12/21/14 12:00 P.M PST - And now, finally, I managed to listen to the whole thing while doing dishes. My life is good.

So, anyways, real introduction paragraph, chances are you know who William Basinski is if you actually care about this kind of music. If you don't know him, his discography is all drone and ambient music and you don't care about that. This guy is good stuff, The Disintegration Loops are highly regarded and I believe that to be a well-deserved reputation in spite of the fact that total composing time was less than the running time (unless you wanna argue that total composing time is 2 decades and that's bullcrap) and Melancholia is some gloriously tranquil winter music. Other works of his I've listened to were pleasant enough but not particularly memorable to me. Let's see if this one outranks those.

Let's see? More like I already saw. And this particular album, one 50 minute drone, is pretty damn good. Not as good as the two/five aforementioned albums, but more memorable than any of his other works that I've listened to thus far. The album is literally the same sound (I'm not inclined to call it a melody) for 50 minutes. Theoretically if you've heard half a minute then you can say you've heard the whole album and move on with your life, but damnit this is drone music and I'd be an asshole to complain about a lack of structure. The sound itself? Amazing. It just transports you to a cold empty mountainside, like most of Basinski's music honestly. But this one does it in a better way. Crap I am horrible at describing ambient music.

Best Track: egg sandwich
Rating: 9/10 (How is it that two out of three of my 9s thus far are ambient music? I barely listen to ambient music)