Composer’s ode to time in decaying tapes
When William Basinski first started making the sort of music he’d come to be known for — after he’d moved to San Francisco for the “rich sounds” of its fog and hills and creaking cable cars — he relied a lot on tape machines and refrigerators.
“You can get so many sophisticated overtones inside an old freezer,” he once told the Fader, a music magazine based in New York City.
Some 40 years later, Basinski’s approach to music hasn’t much changed. He still hunts for sounds in places most people would never imagine looking. But his field has widened some.
In his latest piece, “On Time Out of Time,” which Basinski plans to present for the first time in the United States on Friday, April 20, as part of the Lab’s 24 Hour Telethon, he plays not with the sound of a compressor, but with a sound 1.3 billion years in the making.
“It’s basically about two f—ing black holes,” he says over the phone from Los Angeles. “It’s about two black holes that merged 1.3 billion years ago.”
The force of this collision finally made itself felt on Earth in 2015 and was picked up on ultrasensitive radars run by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. Basinski said it was “a tiny little
blip while they were sleeping. ... And it wasn’t an earthquake.” Thanks to some connections in the world of “art science,” Basinski got his hands on pieces of the recordings.
“On Time Out of Time,” begins with these blips, these “sounds from this fantastic anomaly” and then he extrapolates in his own way. What starts out as a drone becomes increasingly romantic as “these waves start to spread throughout the universe.”
The piece ends with a section called “The Lovers.”
Basinski’s performance Friday, however, isn’t notable simply for the debut of this work. The musician will take listeners through something of a marathon performance, which will run from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. (Guests are encouraged to bring pillows and blankets if they plan to stay the entire night.)
The bulk of the evening will be a performance of what is perhaps his most seminal composition, “The Disintegration Loops.” This will be, as far as he can remember, only the second time he’s done something like this.
To say he’ll be performing the “The Disintegration Loops,” is more than a little inaccurate. These loops comprise some six hours of sound that is hard to describe. Knowing how they came together, though, helps a bit.
Back in 2001, Basinski was working to convert old loops he’d recorded on cassette tapes several years before — loops he had created after he dropped out of school in Texas to explore the sounds hanging in the air. As he copied these old loops, he began to notice they were degrading. The bits of ferrite — the metal on the plastic backing that actually creates the music — were breaking free, and as they did, distortions and moments of silence would appear in the subsequent loop.
So he continued to tape, until the loops contorted into wholly new visions and finally faded into nothing. The result is uncanny. Something familiar in each repetition, and yet always something new.
But the story doesn’t end there. The morning Basinksi finally finished the recordings was the same day two planes would slam into the twin towers in New York, reminding an entire nation, and perhaps the world, that impermanence, of one sort or another, is the only thing one can expect with much certainty.
Basinski set a section of the music to videotape he had shot from a friend’s Brooklyn rooftop as smoke from the collapsed buildings rose over Manhattan. The piece has come to represent that Sept. 11 in ways Basinski could never have imagined.
As Mark Richardson wrote for Pitchfork in November 2012, upon the reissue of the “The Disintegration Loops,” in a rare perfect “10” review: “This music reminds us of how everything eventually falls apart and returns to dust.”
Even two black holes, finally falling into one another’s embrace.
The mood, as Basinski essentially DJs the tracks (there’s no real way to re-create the sound of loss other than to listen again to its ghost) will no doubt be much less somber. The 24 Hour Telethon begins at 4:20 p.m. — though Basinski doesn’t begin until 8 p.m. — and he’ll be accompanied by visual artists Brock Monroe and Seth Kirby, who deal in the sort of oil-and-colored-water projections that evoke a much younger San Francisco.
It took a while before Basinski could call this, and many of his pieces, his own. He was always unsure whether he was creating something or just pulling something out of the air. In that same interview with the Fader, he called the loops “something I discovered. It’s not something I composed.”
He’s since moved away from that, though.
“I own it. I did it. It’s legit,” he says. “It’s a blessing. It saved my life. It started my career. I love those works.” Ryan Kost is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rkost@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @RyanKost.