William Basinski

The third millennium is not a time of faith but of worship, not of the sacred but of the ritualistic: among audiences there's a search, perhaps almost unconscious, for an immediate transcendence by stepping into a context already set up for that very purpose. Hence the great need for cultic subjects and objects, sharp profiles standing out against the cultural sea of a big city, capable of generating a "here and now" that admits no replicas or imitations.

With this in mind, credit must go to Threes and Basemental for the remarkable genius loci chosen for William Basinski's one-off Milan date: a feat attested above all by the massive crowd queuing on the churchyard of Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa, many of whom only now discovered that the church houses the site-specific installation by Dan Flavin, the American master of neon light.

After no small amount of organizational to-and-fro, the doors open and the naves fill up with an audience largely under 30. Setting aside the jaw-dropping location, the turnout is nothing short of astonishing for an essentially ambient musician, who in recent years has nonetheless visited Italy repeatedly, building through his live shows a very personal cult following.

In cases like this, contagion takes hold — through the press and word of mouth — a crescendo of anticipation that ends up exceeding every expectation. Something fairly rare for my usual concert-going experience happened to me: I could distinctly feel the whole weight of expectation from the people sitting around me, feeling almost uneasy, my heart rate slightly raised, on an evening when I knew exactly what I was in for — and in hindsight, it's fair to say not everyone present was quite so aware.

Entering from the sacristy, Basinski smiles with satisfaction and gives a small wave to the audience, then before taking his place at the altar he turns around and, with great reverence, kneels and makes the sign of the cross. The vault of the central nave lights up green, the transept pale red, the apse yellow: three sharply delineated chromatic segments, exactly as per Flavin's design, realized a year after his death in 1996.

As amazed as the audience by the spectacular setting, the Texan artist introduces his performance, conceived specifically for this space. It's essentially a soft-edged ambient prelude, emotionally understated so as to create a more effective contrast with the concert's centerpiece: with its extremely delicate piano arpeggio, looped within a span of barely ten seconds, "Cascade" is one of the most iconic forms taken by the melancholy that has shaped nearly all of Basinski's work; a feeling that, through the technique of looping, can only obsessively refer back to itself, sinking into repetition until it almost vanishes.

Once the sense of passing time is lost, what happens resembles the completion of an osmosis whereby the melody virtually ceases to exist as an external acoustic phenomenon and becomes a "mindset," a present memory of an imagined past, a potential sum of everything we have been up to that moment. When time is no longer a steady flow, active listening naturally thins out, shifting on a perceptual level while remaining unchanged in substance — if anything, becoming even more pronounced.

An experience everyone seems ready for, in words, but one that in practice doesn't fail to breed boredom and disillusionment, a reluctance to surrender to a moment that could almost be called foreign to the shared idea of "music." Even in a multicultural city hungry for everything new and exclusive, there are still plenty of strongholds to be stormed in order to topple the prevailing logic of entertainment.

Time is our sickness, and we can't muster the willpower needed to cure it: the sublime art of William Basinski, sadly, still has far fewer followers than it might seem. His moving final tribute is a classical aria recorded on tape, the last voice to pass through and fill with passion a place that has become supremely sacred, where time aspires to be all time.

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