Vivian & Ondine can be mistaken for nothing but a viciously dank look into the deepest and darkest majesty of the buried winter season. Basinski’s winter is a far cry from the likes of say, Pantha du Prince’s, whose mystical, sparkling ice sculptures have only ever danced on the safe and sunny edge of winter, inspiring childlike wonder and curiosity. Vivian & Ondine treads a very different path, into the utterly bleak, slow and heavy beating heart of winter’s depths.
That is of course the aim; the composition tremors with awe and foreboding, at the heart of which is a powerful sense of long forgotten grandeur. Whatever past this scenery may once have known has long since been ravaged by the raw cold; it now lies barren and frozen, barely able to breathe under the weight of its own brutally saturated atmosphere. The ever tugging but ultimately unchanging echoes of ambience achieve a cavernous, devastatingly somber tension that has been expertly realized by Basinski, who further solidifies his rightful place as a cornerstone artist in his field.
Newcomers to ambient will absolutely not want to test the waters here (for you I recommend Eluvium or Helios, who are downright poppy in comparison to this). Anyone used to hearing melody in their music will have difficulty putting up with hearing the same unfaltering three note sequence for 45 minutes straight, and indeed it’s likely to make even more weathered fans of the genre a bit restless.
The album is not complete repetition; new textures are slowly and steadily (emphasis on slowly) phased in and out, but even these changes will require an attentive ear to pick up on. Basinski has certainly never shied away from repetition, but he is likely to push some listeners to their limits with Vivian & Ondine. Basinski’s offering from last year, the 60 minute, four track album, 92982, feels like a breath of fresh air in comparison.
Although this album does an admirable job of creating mood and suggesting imagery of ancient depth and the empty aftermath of icy devastation, it does so with completeness long before it reaches its end. There will undoubtedly be a few don’t even think to consider the run time and simply bask in the unmistakeable feeling this composition provokes, but for too many it will long overstay its welcome, which is a shame considering how potent this might have been were there a few more ideas to balance it out.
