Deconstructing sound
William Basinski explores the ephemeral existence of song and his relationship to the past
WHEN William Basinski was a kid from Clear Lake in the early 1960s, he found himself thinking about space travel.
Not the explosive and propulsive work required to launch a man into space, that was the domain of Basinski’s father, a mathematician and engineer who worked for NASA at the time. Basinski was interested in the feeling of being in space — of detachment, immersed in silence. Even back on Earth, his curiosity was piqued by space travel, what he perceived to be the sounds of Mission Control when it was unattended.
“The weird drones of the computers going on and on,” he says, grinning. “That na na na na na na na.”
Basinski would grow up interested more in music than math or science, and fell under the spell of an alternative form of space traveler in David Bowie, whose music set Basinski on a different course, one that required years of patience and persistence, which didn’t come naturally to a high-strung, jittery young outcast.
Basinski’s distinctive approach to music would eventually find its audience. He’s now regarded as a pioneer and legendary figure in modern electronic music, his sound finding its way to both large-scale music festivals and symphony orchestras. But his success came at the end of a long journey full of uncertainty.
Basinski’s latest album, like much of his other work, concerns itself with life in decay and our ephemeral existence, referenced in the title composition “A Shadow in Time.” That piece of music is paired with “For David Robert Jones,” Basinski’s tribute to Bowie, whom he describes as “one of the biggest heroes of mine.”
Basinski was at his partner’s family ranch in Celeste, northeast of Dallas, last year when he heard of Bowie’s death.
“My phone woke me up, and I looked to see what was going on,” he says. “I had all these text messages about Bowie, but they were real vague. But I found out and just thought, ‘What am I doing out here?’ They weren’t playing any of his music on the radio. In Celeste, you can hear a lot of classic country, which I love, too. But I just felt disconnected and sad. Like, why was he dead and all these other (expletive) (expletive) are alive? But we don’t get to work those scales. Maybe it was the rapture … .”
Back in Los Angeles, weeks later, Basinski started working with an old tape loop he’d made in the early 1980s. He added his Voyetra 8 synthesizer and some saxophone, its disjointed purring sound a distinctive nod to Bowie, a sax player himself. Echoing some of Basinski’s now canonized “Disintegration Loops,” the piece possesses the feeling of labored breathing until it gradually fades to silence.
“I love the rhythm of breath,” he says. “The rhythm of the ocean. I’ve always loved that kind of natural rhythm. And I’ve never been a person who liked much percussion. And the saxophone has that, the sound of a breath and the quality of a voice. So the Bowie piece and ‘Shadow’ tied together nicely. The album became an elegy for lost friends and lost heroes.”
The loneliness of searching for sound
Checking in via Skype, Basinski looks the part of a rock star, decked out in a black turtleneck, aviator shades and a widebrimmed hat.
He pulls on a bottle of Corona between drags on his cigarette. And if not exactly a rock star, he’s nevertheless found a curious space in contemporary music: Like 1960s minimalists (Steve Reich, Philip Glass), his avant garde bona fides are strong, but he’s also crossed over with a young audience more attuned to electronic music outside the pop/rock sphere.
Basinski’s music roots started to settle in Dallas as a teen. But he spent early childhood in Clear Lake City, where his father was involved in developing the lunar module.
“I was too young to really understand it, but I think even then I knew something profoundly exciting and moving was happening when I was a child,” he said. “Daddy never talked about it. But you could tell things were going on. And there was tragedy. Mistakes were made, people died. Even if we didn’t know everything that was going on, we were affected by what was happening.”
In the mid-’60s Basinski’s family moved to Florida, and then they returned to Texas and resettled in Richardson, where he describes ’70s life as presented in books like “The Ice Storm” and “The Stepford Wives.”
“My parents weren’t hosting key parties or anything,” he says. “But it was clear then, you have your life and kids have their life and nobody knows what’s going on as long as you’re home for dinner and don’t get arrested.”
High school is when he found Bowie, along with Elton John and Queen and “other transgressive, terrific stuff.”
“That was mind-blowing music to me at that age. Of course, our parents were appalled. They didn’t know what to do anymore. So they drank, and we smoked pot.”
Basinski played clarinet in the band at Richardson, but struggled to fit into such a large ensemble. His teacher thought Basinski had symphony potential. “He wanted me to be first-chair clarinet at the New York Philharmonic or something, but I wanted to be Bowie by then,” he says.
He saved money from mowing lawns and bought a saxophone and joined the school jazz band.
Basinski studied music at the University of North Texas, which he describes as a bad fit for him. Though, one course on new music introduced him to the progressive work of Reich and John Cage and helped him set a new path.
He lived in San Francisco briefly in the late ’70s, where he first began making tape loops: isolating little pieces of recording to be played repetitively and also manipulated or paired with other snippets of sound to form something entirely different sounding than the source material.
“I wanted a Mellotron, but I couldn’t afford one,” he says. “So I started recording these other lush sounds and creating my own thing by looping them.”
Electronic instrumental music was beginning to flourish at that time, though much of that music still hemmed close to traditional rock song form.
“It was coming out of prog rock,” Basinski says. “An extension of prog rock.”
His work existed in a different sphere, closer to that of studied modern composers like Reich or Brian Eno, whose ambient work was an influence. Basinski’s music was made without an immediately discernible path, where subtle variations on repetition played out over long pieces.
He moved to New York, where recognition remained slow to arrive, but he found company among other experimental artists, including his longtime partner, James Elaine, an experimental artist and filmmaker.
“Oh, god, you have no idea how lonely it felt for a long time,” he says. “But I had friends painting in their studios, and I was sort of painting with sound in my studio. We were all creating another world in our loft. The neighbors thought we were from outer space. We’d work day jobs, come home and find this creative space to live in. Maybe it was like being an astronaut: We just wanted to explore space.”
The developing demand of disintegration
Basinski found sounds all over: He’d record the refrigerator in his loft, or the Muzak that penetrated the wires of his Midtown loft from a radio tower next door. His shortwave radio caught the sounds of particle showers. “I knew this great (expletive) was coming in, but it took a long time for anybody else to care about it,” he says. Basinski would record everything and sort through it later. Often times, much later. He’d play his loops at galleries to accompany Elaine’s work, and he made a few cassettes that he gave to friends in the city’s fringe arts community, like the singer Anohni, who said of Basinski’s tapes, “I felt that there was a healing quality to the work, even at its most frightening or melancholic.”
A commercially available recording didn’t surface until the late-’90s with “Shortwavemusic.”
Then around 2000, Basinski started to digitize some of his old Muzak loops from the early 1980s. When he fed them into the machine, the metal tapes began to turn to dust. He captured the sound of the music disintegrating, which became the foundation for his defining project: After, Basinski paired his “dlp 1.1,” the first of the Disintegration Loops, with footage he shot of dusk in lower Manhattan as smoke rose from the ruins of the World Trade Center on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001.
The Disintegration Loops increased demand for Basinski’s recorded work as well as live appearances.
He had hours and hours of material from which to work.
Over the past two decades, he’s made music from his old tape loops: “Garden of Brokenness,” released in 2005, was made from some piano experiments he recorded in 1979, and “Nocturnes” (2013) was made from piano and tape pieces he created that same year. “Shortwavemusic” — released in 1997 and rereleased a decade later — was built from recordings he made on that radio in 1982. The title of the beautiful “92982” gives away its vintage — September 1982 — made from found sounds in Brooklyn on an old Norelco tape deck.
Each old loop yields something different. One might think Basinski’s archive of sounds — essentially his paints — are meticulously arranged, but he says they are not.
“My filing system is a mess,” he says. “The tapes are in boxes and they’re in ice cream containers and take out containers. Sometimes I dig around and think, ‘What’s this?’ Some are good, some are not. Some are terrible. They’re labeled. But even a Sharpie fades over time.”
Capturing the slow creep of obsolescence
Basinski’s work invites thought about time, both while listening to a given piece and contemplating his body of work as a whole. Collectively, his art feels unmoored from our linear concept of time, feeling more like a flowing river than a series of flags dropped in a landscape to mark time.
Fittingly common among the recordings are Basinski’s fascination with the dissipation of sound. He’s drawn to the way a note decays and is less interested in the attack, the moment a note is struck. He created one piece by playing notes on the piano and cutting out each attack. Doing so creates a sense of mystery: The instrument is no longer instantly identifiable. It also speaks to the temporary quality of sound and life. His process is to capture the slow creep of obsolescence. The effect can be entrancing as well as haunting.
And strangely, for music so informed by slow fades, Basinski’s work has proven regenerative, akin to classical music. His first two Disintegration Loops have been transcribed and performed by classical ensembles, starting in 2011 when the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York hosted a memorial concert on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
The Wordless Music Orchestra breathed life into music that was transcribed after a journey that spanned decades through all manner of electronic shape-shifting. Removing electronic music from recorded context and placing it into a live symphonic setting might seem hardwired for disaster, but the brass perfectly captures the weathered, weezing sound of Basinski’s original work.
He’s clearly heartened by the broad reach of the music, since his background touches both on classical study and ’70s rock. Basinski turns 60 next year and plans to focus more on increasing his reach in an orchestral setting.
“We’re getting more of the Disintegration Loops transcribed,” he says. “Turning 60 and all, I’d like to see that become the focus next year. Orchestras need new work in the repertory. And I think these pieces are definitely something you could classify as new work.”