photo courtesy of William Basinski (1990)
by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood)
On a recent fall evening in Los Angeles, a couple hundred people gathered at the Nimoy Theater to take a trip back in time—1.3 billion years ago, to be exact. Our time machine? The sound of two black holes colliding captured by a large-scale physics experiment as interpreted by William Basinski, the ambient composer who, for the last four decades, has transfixed audiences with his tape loops of disintegrating melody. The darkened theater is tight with anticipation. Several people next to me sip IPAs through plastic lidded cups and fiddle with their phones. Basinski is late.
When Basinski emerges a few minutes later—dressed in black, shirt open to the waist, long hair pulled back, the theatre’s lone spotlight glinting in the lenses of his aviator sunglasses like a solar flare—he’s welcomed by a hearty applause. The 66-year-old composer greets us with flair, shimmying and hip-shaking, arms akimbo, in a jig reminiscent of a flailing inflatable outside a used car lot—the Dodger Dance. Lest one mistake the proceedings for pretentious puffery, Basinski jubilantly calls, “Shohei Ohtani is the biggest star in the fucking world!” The room cheers.
The delay, it seems, is directly correlated to the completion of the Dodgers playoff game in which the boys in blue beat the New York Mets to advance to the World Series. Fandom aside, Basinski turns to the task at hand, blowing kisses and promising we’re all going to “trip out.” He sits at a folding table occupied by a laptop, mixer, and a glass of water and begins the show.
It’s hard to imagine a larger gulf between an artist’s persona—in Basinski’s case: joyous, bawdy, mischievous—and work. Basinski’s decaying tape loops are desperately lonely and beautiful, yielding one of ambient music’s most influential works, The Disintegration Loops, among many others. Attending a live performance of the work is akin to experiencing a new sense. Sound behaves in unexpected ways, refracting and expanding like some cosmic lung. Tonight’s performance is no different. For three quarters of an hour, Basinski beguiles and bewitches, manipulating a loop of the black hole dance, a low rumbling we feel as much as hear.
The work, On Time, Out of Time, captured on album in 2019, is a collaboration with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and part of Pacific Standard Time, a bicoastal initiative that seeks to unite science with the Arts. The performance arrives on the heels of September 23rd, Basinski’s first release from the as-of-now amorphous Arcadia Archives on Temporary Residence (when I asked him what was next in the series, he demurred, “Well, I don’t [know] yet, but I have some ideas”). Like the concert, the album is its own little time machine, a reworking of a salvaged performance from a composition Basinski wrote in high school.
When we speak via video call, Basinski’s memory of his early days easily unspools. His inflection is unhurried in that syrupy Houston way as he gabs about legends of the 1980s New York art scene as if it were yesterday, waving an unlit cigarette in hand like a wizard’s wand. The locale of our story is Downtown Brooklyn off the J Street/Borough Hall stop, in a loft on 351 Jay Street, which Basinski and his partner, the visual artist James Elaine, affectionately called Casa Degli Artisti.
The couple had moved from San Francisco, arriving in New York on April Fool’s Day, 1980, the first day of a two-week transit strike. “There we were, in our cowboy boots and our skinny black jeans, just come into Grand Central Station, and there’s no buses, no subways,” Basinski chuckles. “And well, we started walking. And boy, did we have blisters when we went back to Westchester that night!”
The artists wanted to live in Manhattan but quickly discovered they were priced out of desired neighborhoods like TriBeCa and SoHo and not up for the gritty, cars-on-fire, open-air drug market of Alphabet City. So, they ended up in Downtown Brooklyn, in a 6th floor, 5000 square-foot loft right across from the Transit Authority building, for $800 a month. Casa Degli Artisti sat perched above a hardware store and Michealangelo’s, an Italian restaurant whose owner doubled as the building’s landlord. The view out the loft’s 27 windows showcased the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, and Manhattan in all its Art Deco glory, spread out like paint on a canvas.
Basinski quickly set to work making the place their own, assembling a music studio for himself and a painting area for Jamie, often cruising around the open space wearing little more than hot pants. This was 1980 and the 351 Jay Street loft crackled with artistic electromagnetism. New York was a queer artist mecca where oddballs and outcasts from the dusty fields of the Great Plains and the oil derrick depths of the South converged for a life of freedom and expression. Basinski’s downstairs neighbor was John Epperson, known more famously as world-renowned drag artist, Lypsinka.
“The day I met Johnny, I’m in my Daisy Dukes and roller skates or something, trying to screw sheetrock into aluminum studs with a screwdriver on the hot summer day, and all of a sudden, there's a couple of queens peeking in the window, and it's John Epperson and my dear friend Skip Boling, who's an architect, and they live downstairs. Apparently, Johnny had come up on his way to the roof—you know, tar beach—seen me and then run back downstairs and exclaimed to Willem, there’s a drag queen upstairs!”
Casa Degli Artisti quickly became synonymous with the other-worldly soundscapes emanating from Basinski’s studio which had been designed to resemble a space station.
“Everybody thought we were from Mars,” Basinski recalls.
At the time, the composer was working on two large flat-bed, portable, 40-pound Norelco reel-to-reel decks from the late 50s or early 60s, very simple, “perfect for tape loops.” When paired with his Frippertronics loop and feedback loop tape delay system, Basinski was able to transform early piano compositions into blissed out, alternate universe soundscapes. Basinski would record himself playing on John Epperson’s impeccably tuned piano downstairs then go upstairs and find an effective loop to ride into oblivion.
It was an exceptionally fertile period. The material he’d record would later appear in part on Melancholia, Basinski’s underappreciated masterpiece from 2003. For the September 23rd piece, Basinski remembers his playing to be only so-so, but when looping it and surfing the feedback, he was able to achieve something entirely other. The feeling of September 23rd is one of becoming. The composition blooms and recedes with entire seasons of time born, living and dying within its languid forty minutes. The repetition becomes hypnotic, the feedback a pulse. Each moment Basinski captures is unique unto itself, irreplaceable, fleeting, the tape slowly fraying like the foxing of a photograph.
A week after we speak, Basinski’s performance at the Nimoy echoes the same uncertainty, the same presentation of a moment in time that happens once and cannot be replicated. It’s a tension the artist requires for any of his performances to be successful.
“The not knowing what’s going to happen—that’s what makes my performances interesting for me and for the audience,” Basinski says. “There's a lot of concentration and a lot of listening. I try not to do too much, let things resonate. If something's working, let it work.”
The performance of On Time, Out of Time reflects this approach. Lit only by projected images of a refracting water drop with a prism field orbiting about it like a halo, Basinski meticulously adjusts the touchpad of the laptop or rides the feedback on his mixer. This piece is a little different than many of his live performances. As a collaboration with LIGO, it’s pre-recorded. Still, Basinski extracts singularity. Over the course of an hour, what begins as the convergence of black holes is slowly subsumed by a scrawl of noise. The fade is so gradual, yet so complete, that when it’s finished, the room isn’t merely silent, it’s as if sound itself never existed.
The music of William Basinski and the concept of time cannot be separated. The two are inexorably linked, by process and by memory. In fact, one could argue that a piece like September 23rd works like recall pulled from deep within oneself decades after the fact. Here, memory becomes an artifact replayed over and over in one’s mind, like a tape loop, until the truth of what happened is lost and all that’s left is the simulacrum of the memory itself.
“My music is moments in time,” Basinski says, dragging from his cigarette. “You think about people with dementia or Alzheimer's. When they hear music that they loved, they remember. It's very powerful what music does to the brain and that’s why it's such a wonderful thing. As it goes into your body, into your brain, it changes your chemistry.”
“It can be very healing,” he adds. “It can also be terrifying.”
In a performance, on record, or in the studio, Basinski’s music is just that: a moment, singled out, isolated, ephemeral, sand slipping through the bottleneck of an hourglass. For Basinski, it’s about holding onto these moments a little longer.
“Yeah,” he says to me, looking offscreen into some middle distance. “Let’s just keep it here for a little longer.”
September 23rd is out now via Temporary Residence Ltd. Special thanks to Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA.