When he synched the visual with the disintegration loops, something clicked.īasinski released “The Disintegration Loops” in four volumes, in 20. He returned to the roof and began videotaping the clouds of debris at Ground Zero as night fell. Downstairs, he played music as loud as he could, until the “disintegration loops” started. But from his roof he could see a huge cloud of smoke drifting into Brooklyn from lower Manhattan. On September 11, 2001, Basinski had a job interview with the arts organization Creative Time at the World Trade Center. Basinski copied as many loops as he could, capitalizing on the changes happening to the sounds as the tapes turned into dust. That metal is the music, and the music was crumbling. Magnetic tape stores information on bits of metal affixed to a ribbon. Some of the tapes were in terrible shape, and as Basinski let the loops play they fell apart. He had decided to start transferring the loops he’d made in the early eighties to CDs, for posterity. It wasn’t until the summer of 2001 that Basinski stumbled into the work that brought him out of obscurity. Basinski began to play his loops for people at Arcadia, which got a reputation as a place for others, including Antony Hegarty, later of Antony and the Johnsons, to develop their craft. In 1989, he and Elaine moved to a loft in Williamsburg that became known as Arcadia. Though he didn’t release any music, he was gathering material that he “never could have created with pencil and paper,” he says. Some loops were made from his own playing, others from accidental noises or from radio-station broadcasts bleeding into his amplifiers and tape decks. Over the next few years, Basinski made hundreds of loops, which he organized by hanging them from a tree branch that he kept near his mixing desk. In 1980, Basinski and Elaine moved to a loft in downtown Brooklyn. He captured the sounds of a rented piano, the inside of his freezer, ambient noises of San Francisco-“the clicking electric buses, the grasshopper legs, and the trolleys creaking,” he says-and made physical loops of this material. Basinski began buying cheap tape recorders and creating the work that sustains him today. He met the man who is still his partner, the visual artist James Elaine, and moved to San Francisco on Halloween of the same year. He became interested in the music of what he calls “three points to a triangle”: John Cage, Steve Reich, and Brian Eno. In the summer of 1978, he ditched school and travelled around Texas to see bands like the Sex Pistols and Television. Raised in Dallas, Basinski studied saxophone and clarinet at the University of North Texas, in Denton, for two years. He seemed unbothered that the small crowd was eating sandwiches, chatting, and drinking wine. As mist scrolled over the Hudson, above the bluish Catskills, Basinski sipped beer and played a series of mesmerizing piano loops that suggested worlds crumbling and blooming between the notes. In September, when Basinski performed a version of his forthcoming release, “Cascade,” on the grounds of Olana, the historic home of Frederic Edwin Church, in upstate New York, he showed up in a white raincoat, a black leather cowboy hat, and driving gloves. But Basinski is Billy to his friends, an unshakably cheerful man who seems more like a retired surfer than like a composer. His work resonates with his name-it’s severe and Eastern European, a body of intense and grave music. The composer William Basinski falls into this second category. Other musicians, like actors, create things that bear little relation to what they do offstage. With Taylor Swift or Frank Sinatra, songs and singer line up and suggest a single human being, with the music presented as evidence of lived experience. Illustration by Stamatis Laskosįor some musicians, the link between persona and material is as short as a wick. Basinski started recording the changes that happen to audiotape as it turns to dust.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |