William Basinski - Time Out of Joint

The hills around Palombara Sabina are home to vines and olive trees. Digging into the clay soil of those hills, you can find, perfectly preserved, fossils of shells and fish belonging to another era. In the midst of research for the writing of a small booklet on new trends in sound, I happened to meet William Basinski. I later had the chance to speak with him on the phone, to ask him about his musical thinking and the aesthetics of his compositions. And he, with the gift for synthesis that accompanies extraordinary individuals, pointed me toward the keys to reading his work and gave me plenty of food for thought. Basinski is first and foremost a musician, a saxophonist steeped in jazz. Beyond that, he has lived through the paths of experimentation, engaging as well with the more technical aspects of modern musical art. So not just building with sounds, but, to borrow from an illustrious thinker, “building sound from within,” chiseling it moment by moment and event by event like a plastic material.

The path is that of musique concrète, but the way of walking it is that of a dreamer, someone always attentive to the emotional side, to the unconscious reception of the message and to the suggestion it can induce in the listener. Basinski uses analog materials and sources, working digitally only for mixing and mastering. He demands organic quality from his sounds, wants to breathe in their fine fiber, the part that remains in his hands as he sifts and breaks them down, “disintegrating” them, as he himself would put it. In sounds he sees images, because sound is intrinsically image, and there need not be a hierarchical cause-and-effect relationship between the two. He lends his music to installations and light shows, receiving in return the multidimensionality that strikes both the public's eye and ear.

One might venture to call it multisensoriality, a psychoacoustic strategy, a shamanic rite, magic that lets you keep hearing music even after it has stopped. Loops repeated for an hour, slowly and continuously stripped of their sonic substance, work the miracle. In the brain and in the ears, a trace of the sound remains, a wonderful spell: nothing is lost, everything is rebuilt. The fossils in the red earth of the hills of Palombara Sabina are a reminder that once, there, the sea was.

William Basinski's rediscovery began with the marvelous Disintegration Loops series, four CD-Rs (later reissued on CD) and a DVD that did a great deal to spread the American musician's art around the world. Before that, few had taken any notice of him. Legend has it that it was Carsten Nicolai, boss of the German label Raster-Noton, who discovered Basinski during a stay in New York. And indeed the long-playing release Shortwavemusic is the first work in Basinski's catalog to be released, precisely by Noton, back in 1997. Out of print for years, the album was reissued in early 2007 on CD with bonus tracks added. At the time Basinski was pressing his CD-Rs in ridiculously small runs of just 300 copies. Few noticed the beauty of Watermusic, but with the Disintegration Loops series things began to change.

The Disintegration Loops I is a long litany in memory of the tragedy of September 11, 2001. In those days Basinski was transferring onto tape the sounds that would end up in this work, and he witnessed the tragic event as a stunned onlooker. It is not a political statement but an impressionistic picture of pain, of the anguish of disappearance and loss. Debris that slowly clouds the senses. A single sensation, always the same, repeating endlessly, as if time itself had gone out of joint. The first image in this interminable take lasts more than an hour, sixty-three and a half minutes to be precise. Then another ten-odd minutes of a desolate void: a tired, strangled siren meant to reassure, which instead, with its boundless echo, only confirms the terrible emptiness that has come to be.

The Disintegration Loops II came out a year after the first volume, in 2003, on CD-R again through Basinski's own private label, 2062. The work's structure mirrors that of the first volume, but here the two tracks run thirty-two and forty-two minutes respectively. Only micro-variations in the mixing and in the consistency of the loop distinguish the opening pieces of the two works. That doesn't make the impact any less devastating — quite the opposite: the debris flows cyclically over fragments of melodies that, in their lightness and fragility, are almost moving. The shift between the two sonic layers means that every so often the “disintegrated” loop makes more room for the desolate stillness of the lower layer. The transition into the second movement is a masterstroke: these intervals are the true strength of the Disintegration Loops series, moments that show the greatness of William Basinski's art.

Volumes 3 and 4 of the series also came out in 2003. The Disintegration Loops III is split into two parts, the first lasting 20 minutes and the second 52. The cover depicts the scene of the tragedy a few hours later. The sky is dark and debris shrouds the city lights. The music is almost reassuring: a piano phrase buried beneath the rubble emerges like the lights beneath the clouds over the city. In the second part, the loop becomes almost orchestral, losing much of the rhythmic component it had in the first 20 minutes. A long agony that drags on for nearly an hour.

The final chapter of the tetralogy, The Disintegration Loops IV, is the only one split into three parts: the first lasting 40', the second 21' and the last just 12'. Orpheus has by now taken possession of the entire city, and his lyre resounds through streets left desolate and still shaken by the avalanche of debris slowly drifting through the darkness. The symphony in three movements seems to be a synthesis of everything that came before: the movement of the first part is followed by the contemplation of the second and, finally, the resignation of the third. There is also a DVD titled The Disintegration Loops 1.1, featuring footage shot from the roof of the warehouse where Basinski lives in Brooklyn (the Arcadia). It shows the same scene as the Disintegration Loops cover art: a cloud of debris slowly filling the sky as night falls around it.

Like the Disintegration Loops series, Watermusic too is split into several volumes. The first consists of a single long, sixty-minute track. An hour of ambient music built by Basinski playing a Voyetra synthesizer. A light, delicate, impalpable drone slowly takes hold of the atmosphere, circling on itself like a manta ray over the ocean floor. Terry Riley and Brian Eno are reference points that shouldn't be misleading: Basinski's touch is distinct and personal, and his Watermusic is anything but a simple homage to these masters. The second volume, too, is a single long piece lasting 66 minutes. These two works lack the dramatic urgency of communication that pervades The Disintegration Loops, and the electronic textures turn more experimental and erudite. Seen from the opposite angle, one might call it an extremely human computer music. The structure is built on organ sounds modulated by a drone that sits at a fairly high frequency. Notes appear and disappear like waves on the sea's surface, while the drone, the surface itself, is always there. Basinski seems to want to tell us that the vision of vastness can be fascinating, while the realization of it is devastating: it leaves one motionless, superficially stunned, uselessly attentive to something that is not made to human scale. At times cold, at times gentle, this music is a hymn to contemplation. It recalibrates the neurons and, as often happens with this kind of sound, makes clear that the sensation of time is not objective.

Before the end of 2002, the German label Raster-Noton released a double CD by William Basinski, The River, containing music recorded and produced back in 1983 using radio waves and little else. Two long tracks — which would very likely be a single piece if a CD could hold ninety minutes of music — slowly grow denser, layering strata upon strata at different speeds until they build an impressively multidimensional structure, completely independent of the coordinates of the surrounding space. The noises we might encounter every day in any house become, in the hands of the New York musician, a symphony of molten lava slowly flowing and thickening into apparently empty structures that suddenly reveal enormous relative distances. If you've ever heard talk of architectural sciences applied to sound, this CD is a good example of what that means.

Even before the recordings that became The River, Basinski had put down on tape some ambient-music ideas which, twenty-four years later, finally saw the light of day thanks to the German label Three Poplars, on an LP titled A Red Score In Tile. Music of muted tones and devastating impact, in which the sounds of acoustic instruments are not yet buried beneath layers of sonic rubble. The idea of conceiving a long piece that slowly gains density through phase-shifting has been Basinski's credo since this very work. The difference from the classic work by Eno and Wyatt from the year before (the pieces on “A Red Score In Tile” were conceived in 1979) lies entirely in the conception of the sonic cell to be shifted: while the two English musicians used a piano phrase to be played, here there is a sound that's almost cut off, not fully melodic — indeed “truncated” — leaving behind it a faint, slightly modulated drone. It's truly remarkable how the choice of just a few intervals can be so decisive to the success of this music. Basinski repeats the same phrase over and over, but with such passion that it's impossible to resist. The ears keep asking to be recalibrated to these sounds, which one can no longer do without.

For many, including this writer, Melancholia is Basinski's masterpiece. Fourteen compositions conceived and recorded over a span of more than ten years, which together give rise to one of the most beautiful ambient-music works of all time. Piano notes left adrift over electronic beds inevitably recall the glorious collaborations between Brian Eno and Harold Budd, but Basinski's skill is that of a superb craftsman with taste: his art describes a world where Nature is not made to Man's scale, but is far greater and inexplicable. There are fragments of music where wind sweeps across desolate moors, where leaves crackle as time passes, loops breaking on the sea of memory, and everything is so cohesive that it makes one hope Basinski has more pieces tucked away for further works like this one.

The much-announced Variations: A Movement In Chrome Primitive wasn't released until 2004, later than originally planned due to the collapse of Durtro, the label run by Current 93. That setback, however, didn't stop David Tibet from encouraging Basinski to finish the work. In response, William dug up eight magnificent tracks from his archives and, after restoring them in his own signature way, split them across two CDs, released in a handsome hardback-style package thanks to Die Stadt. The atmospheres recall A Red Score In Tile, from Basinski's earliest artistic phase (late '70s-early '80s). The technique used on these recordings is his hand-made sampling method, built using nothing but magnetic tape and adhesive tape: it's almost unbelievable how, out of the randomness with which these sound cells repeat certain piano phrases, such achingly beautiful symphonies emerge.

Over time, the organization of noise has become an essential trait of Basinski's music. The state of the art in this field was reached with the unmissable Disintegration Loops series. The same concept underpins Silent Night (released as "Variations: A Movement In Chrome Primitive" in 2004), a single hour-long piece composed by playing a Voyetra 8 synthesizer. On the surface, the mood of this work is relaxed and meditative, but a sharp melancholy runs through the melody that slowly drags itself along for the entire length of the piece.

William Basinski rewrote the principles of ambient music, and it's no surprise that a seasoned connoisseur of boundary-pushing sound like Massimo Ricci crowned him "king of ambient music".

In 2004 Basinski found time to collaborate with a rising star of experimental ambient, another musician as closely tied to the visual arts as he is: Richard Chartier. While Basinski has tried his hand at films and installations of all kinds, Chartier is known for the paintings he sells on the website of his friend Taylor Deupree, with whom he launched a 12k sub-label, Line. But it's for the discerning Japanese label Spekk that the collaboration between the two New Yorkers finally saw the light of day. An hour of light, abstract microelectronics, divided into two parts only in a formal sense. The atmospheres recall Eno's cosmic music, but the attention to detail is such that nothing seems to move at all.

Precious gems keep surfacing from William Basinski's archives. More wonderful old tapes, like those of The Garden Of Brokenness, dating all the way back to 1979. Basinski's music makes the decay caused by the passing of time a fundamental component, and The Garden Of Brokenness is no exception. Following in the footsteps of Melancholia and Silent Night, the Brooklyn musician gives us another ambient masterpiece. Listening to the piano phrase as it first repeats, then vanishes, then resurfaces out of nowhere, your throat almost tightens as you hold your breath, while the mind drifts to Eno and Budd's collaborations in the '80s (but also to Eno's work with Robert Wyatt on the seminal "Music For Airports"). Shapes that seem motionless, yet which Basinski manages to reframe through simple shifts in focus and the addition of obscure background noises. Midway through the record, a drone takes over from the broken piano melody, creating a contrast that flips the perspective entirely. Then the storm drifts away, and peace returns once more.

In 2006 William Basinski released one of his most beloved works, Variations For Piano And Tapes (his first digipak after so many cardboard packages). The American musician had fallen in love with Italy, where he'd been spending more and more time in recent years. The idyllic peace and quiet of a stay in Pantelleria in the spring of 2003 provided the inspiration for this work: yet another tape dug out of his incredible archive. A piano phrase and a loop chase each other, while from the other side of the magnetic tape, echoes of sound reach the tape head like memories from distant eras.

The following year came El Camino Real, another loop unearthed from who knows which drawer. The record consists of a single 50-minute composition. A phrase played by the usual unidentifiable ghost orchestra (a piano? strings? a female voice?) repeats seemingly without end or interruption, digging into the most delicate synapses of our brain. Music that feeds on micro-movements and radiates a magnetism worthy of Arvo Part's work. Perhaps unintentionally, but with astonishing results, Basinski has rewritten the dictionary of ambient music over these years. That same year Basinski also released the CD reissue of Shortwavemusic, originally put out ten years earlier by Noton only on vinyl. A 15-minute track was added to the original programme.

For Basinski, time doesn't flow in a straight line. So it is that 92982 (2009) was born from the rediscovery of old tapes, recorded more than 25 years earlier: magnetic media now restored with the help of digital audio technology. And to further blur the perception of space and time, this time Basinski added a new piece to the tracklist, built however on the same ideas that inspired the loops recorded in New York on September 29, 1982 (hence the album's title). The sound of 92982 crumbles, but doesn't fully disintegrate, as happened with his famous loop series. The melancholy, however, is that of his finest work.

"92982.1" plunges the listener into a muffled, cushioned space: a placid, bucolic loop built on piano notes and strings repeats seemingly unchanged for four minutes and thirty seconds, at which point a phase shift opens up a near-one-minute parenthesis of zero-gravity suspension. This is the essence of Basinski's art, able to depict his entire musical universe through the smallest of variations.

On the following track, "92982.2", behind a fragile, decaying loop, you can hear in the background the sounds of a storm, a helicopter, and later an ambulance: signs of life that slipped in through some window during the recording sessions. The third track ("92982.4") is the extended version of a composition that had already appeared on the 2004 album Variations: A Movement In Chrome Primitive. The record closes with the same theme it opened with: "92982.3" is a new version of "92982.1", recorded in February 2009 in Los Angeles. Rather than a reprise, the track feels more like a space-time short-circuit: as though Basinski had dismantled the rules of time itself and could send sound travelling along the pathways of his own existence.

The stunning cover art that announces Aurora Liminalis is about as fitting a calling card as you could ask for to introduce the new album by Richard Chartier and William Basinski. While Chartier had been in the spotlight not long before, on the occasion of the excellent "Recurrence", for Basinski this marks a return after three years of total silence. It's no surprise, then, that this second collaboration between the pair, following up on Untitled (from 2004), ranks among the most atmospheric and "warm" work either musician has ever produced. Chartier's ambient experimentation and Basinski's passion for sound cycles reach an entirely new fulfilment here, steeped in a caustic, emotional ambient-style sunset that naturally links them back to the darkest soundworks of the Californian pioneers (A Produce and Lustmord, but also the Steve Roach of "Day Out Of Time" and "Dynamic Stillness").

The single, sprawling suite of a good forty-five minutes that gives the record its name and makes up its entirety is an enveloping mass of sound in slow but constant motion, perfectly suited to depicting the sinuous trails of the aurora. The crescendo of the opening minutes rises up from the depths of dark-ambient, gradually gaining more light: it's an exchange between Chartier's almost non-musical minimalism and Basinski's loops, never so steeped in field recordings and layered textures. After the first twenty minutes, the process reverses: the descent into darkness is even slower and more imperceptible, marked by the gradual disappearance of melodic echoes in favour of rising natural samples and crackle, which slowly devour the sonic material until it fades away, alone, in the final five minutes.

A small masterpiece from two giants of contemporary electronic music.

In this sense, Nocturnes (2013) stands within the Houston priest's catalogue as his most symbolic and all-encompassing composition, a kind of manifesto that exemplifies the aesthetic rendering of his abstract thinking.

At the heart of the long composition is a handful of prepared-piano loops with their attacks "smoothed off", originally recorded in 1979, back when Basinski used to experiment on a shoestring budget in a San Francisco loft, with his partner and a few friends. The listening experience is fixed in an eternal, ever-shifting instant; memory keeps resurfacing, persistent, the same yet never quite the same, constantly subject to transformation, refractions at varying speeds, and imperceptible crossfades.

The album's second composition presents itself differently, yet in some way complementary: born from the 2009 collaboration with Marina Abramovic (the project "The Life And Death Of Marina Abramovic"), "The Trail Of Tears" is another long flow bearing Basinski's unmistakable hand, this time a progressive-delay tape, his darkest and most funereal drama, before ascending into an unexpected state of fulfilment and awareness that ideally closes the album's discourse. As if to reaffirm the occult nature by which memory insinuates itself into time, and the fact that time can only be conquered on its own terms.

Nocturnes can be considered the fulfilment of the composer's metaphysical journey and of his reckoning with machines. If not his most formally captivating record, it is his darkest and deepest work, the one that most successfully manages to crystallise the moment, restoring it to its a-historical nature, so that it may be relived with a new awareness in its next reincarnation.

Basinski is a master at building loops that seem to come from distant eras and making them sound on forever, in a circle, as if they had to sing of the ruins of time. It's a technique honed over more than thirty years of career that, despite feeding on very few variations, always manages to amaze and engage. The spell repeats itself on the elegiac Cascade (2015) – released together with a vinyl 'twin', The Deluge Live At Issue Project Room (downloadable for free by anyone who buys the Cascade CD). Forty minutes of music that wrap the listener in a haze of fog and emotion. A piano phrase gets lost in a cascade of melancholy, as in Robert Haigh's finest compositions. The shift in atmosphere that Basinski drops in four minutes before the end is the masterstroke of a musician in a perpetual state of grace.

Across the thirty-six minutes of the live recording, the piano disappears for much of the piece beneath cascades of tumultuous reverb. When it reappears, the atmosphere still bears the mark of an echo of noise. The texture loses some of the fragility found on Cascade, while retaining the same overwhelming melancholy.

Also in 2015, William Basinski and Richard Chartier released their third collaboration, recorded together the previous year, on vinyl only: Divertissement follows Aurora Liminalis by two years and once again finds the two American musicians engaging in dialogue around concepts of space and time. The two long tracks occupying the LP's two sides – released by Important also in a colored edition limited to 100 copies – are dense sonic magma built by immersing Basinski's usual magnetic tape loops into majestic electronic structures whose walls seem capable of reverberating any sigh. Snatches of ultra-melancholic melodies light up the narrative with blinding force.

In 2017, a year after the death of the icon David Bowie, the dedication of A Shadow In Time – and specifically its first track – is addressed to the David Robert Jones registered at the London registry office back in 1947: a choral loop of barely ten seconds marks out its entire span, in what initially has the appearance of a heartfelt classical requiem, but whose ecstatic absorption is suddenly shaken by an almost violent contrast with an alien fragment; it's a harsh, amorphous insert, which the worn tape renders similar to an impossible crossbreed between a distorted guitar line and a mournful-toned saxophone. A clear sonic dichotomy that manages to underline the coexistence of complex feelings at the moment of mourning – emotion, gratitude, but also sincere bitterness for an unexpected farewell. The following title track is nothing other than a new liminal aurora, a necessary space of psychic release and quiet transcendence in which any impulse displayed so far seems to dissolve. Except that, a few minutes from the end, a recurring excerpt that first appeared in "Melancholia" (2005) spontaneously resurfaces: an epiphanic manifestation that conceals the true dedication which Basinski has saved for last, to seal his humble and ever so fragile memory of a figure so significant to recent history.

Alongside the melancholic sentiment, the recurrence of the temporal element in the American sound artist's output is unmistakable: raw material and essence of tape music, it makes Basinski's work resemble a journey of ascension from chronos, time as linear succession, to aion, absolute and eternal time; a utopia pursued in vain by classical art and which, in ambient music, from Brian Eno onward, has become the core of generative pieces that already contain the potential for infinity.

In On Time Out Of Time, the primary source of the atmospheric expansions crafted by Basinski are the sounds detected by the American LIGO observatory, via laser interferometers, relating to the merger between two black holes that took place 1.3 billion years ago. This means ideally tracing a line that, originating in a past too remote to grasp rationally, crosses the unknown all the way to the immediate present.

The forty-minute title track undoubtedly carries with it the legacy of Steve Roach, Thomas Köner and Lustmord, but follows the same gradual development in tonal range as the fresco "Mono No Aware", half of the contemporaneous collaboration with Lawrence English (Selva Oscura); a music of the spheres that, from a blurred darkness, soon opens up to the sharp frequencies of shimmering concentric circles, within which a clearer melodic sine wave then carves its way, a solemn beam that might even hold the ultimate mystery of the universe.

As on other occasions in the past, Basinski seals the record with a shorter episode, "4(E+D)4(ER=EPR)": an even more soothing and dreamlike coda, decidedly more contemporary in inspiration, run through by the almost imperceptible tonal oscillations to which magnetic tapes are subject. Ten minutes of ecstatic abandon that reaffirm the minimalist sensibility of a man rightly regarded today as a new master of ambient.

In 2020, a few months after the release of a (strangely) rhythmic and kitsch project that the American composer and musician put out under the name Sparkle Division together with Preston Wendel, Lamentations saw the light of day, a loop-based version of the concept of lamentatio, understood artistically and religiously both as the unbearable pain of a mother powerlessly watching her son's death, and as humanity's cry of pain in the face of an inconsolable tragedy. If the face of Mary gazing upon her dying son Jesus has marked much of religious art, Basinski too traces similar paths, with harrowing loop symphonies, where the anguish and suffering one can perceive sometimes brush against the sublime in the despairing vocal over an electronic backdrop of "O, My Daughter, O, My Sorrow", where for half of its seven-minute duration the sounds are placed at the edge of audibility, set within a dark, watery, descending pattern of indistinguishable instrumentation.

The project, as a whole, starts from the recovery of a few sequences left in a drawer for more than 40 years, built on serially recorded orchestral fragments, static interruptions and blurred depths very close to the masterful, austere sonorities of the epoch-making The Disintegration Loops. These sonic manipulations reveal themselves through a more expansive and playful approach, faintly less severe than in the past. The design conceived by Basinski is a genuine journey through the stars toward the core of a vortex that holds, within its own spiral, soft and paradoxical footholds offered to help one sink serenely into the void of grief.

The abstract journey moves from the gothic opening track "For Whom The Bell Tolls", a solemn and dark dark-ambient omen, to the delicacy of the shifting melodic fragments of "The Wheel Of Fortune". Much of the collection hovers between these two great reference points. The formless breadth of "Passio" brings to the fore the glittering crackle of decay, while "Transfiguration" alternates hissing hints that pierce murky clouds, almost akin to the silence of the Afterlife. Then, from the deck, three pieces emerge marked by a sonic oxymoron of stormy calm, built from audible female voices, blended in near-operatic tones, which ultimately reveal themselves to be a genuine cry of pain.

The eleven minutes of "All These Too, I, I Love" and the dark-drone of "Please, This Shit Has Got To Stop" dole out short, repeated cuts of vocal melodrama, giving the sense of an old shellac opera record skipping on the gramophone at the dawn of time.

The rest of the tracks come across as more linear. The looped alteration of his old tapes is a gloomy ellipsis that finds its climax in repetition, ranging from soft, muted tones ("Paradise Lost") to far more spectacular, if still elegiac, gestures ("Tear Vial").

The closing sequence ("Fin") is a fascinating refinement of the historic "Disintegration Loops": barely a minute and a half long, built on a single sustained note that rides the interference of a crawling microphone hiss, while Basinski's entire body of work, taken as a whole, gracefully takes its bow. Staggering.

Music For Abandoned Airports: Tegel (2021) takes and reworks an old 1998 recording, paying tribute to the founding album of ambient music, "Music For Airports" (1978) by Brian Eno. While Basinski explicitly pays homage to the master Eno — thereby acknowledging his role — on the other hand he empties out the spaces that Eno had imagined filled with people (not) listening to his background music for environments, transforming Eno's insights into a bleak soundtrack for abandoned places, like ruins bearing witness to the dissolution of humanity's presence in the world.

Music For Abandoned Airports: Tegel opens with a quintessentially Basinski piece, an extremely long loop that carries on his ongoing documentation of the decay of sonic matter, as a hypothetical soundtrack for what will inevitably be the future of everything. If Eno's airports were brimming with life, Basinski's is a timeless requiem that tells the story of Berlin's airport, now an abandoned place, symbolically a warning to modern society.

Another four-handed project, this one made together with Janek Schaefer.

Produced by Rafael Anton Irisarri and dedicated to Harold Budd, …On Reflection is a long composition divided into five parts, crafted by the two musicians over a span of time running from 2015 to 2020. The five movements unfold through electroacoustic, meditative textures that hover delightfully between abstraction and expressionism, between dreamlike settings rich in pianistic reverb and liquid electronic sonorities.

Free of any brooding or overly introverted edges, … On Reflection honors all the canons of the most classic ambient music, with a candor and compositional refinement that yields emotional tremors not immediately perceptible, yet destined to leave their mark. The music is like a caress, at times punctuated by the piano's sharper phrasing ("…On Reflection – One"), melodically understated yet damnably close to German cosmic music ("…On Reflection – Three"), stately and sculptural in its slow but intoxicating progression ("…On Reflection – Two"); the minimalism of the compositions flows fluidly, between harmonic expansions and pastoral tonalities that reach their climax in the pairing with field recordings, birdsong and the rustle of waves in the fifth chapter.

The piano phrase that nourishes the single long composition on September 23rd (2024) is an old recording from 1982. Basinski writes in the album's liner notes: "The original piano recordings were made on a piano belonging to my neighbor John Epperson — who later became the world-famous drag artist Lypsinka — at 351 Jay Street, a space known as Casa Degli Artists [sic], our first loft in New York. It was recorded with a small portable recorder (probably a Radio Shack) set on top of the piano while I improvised a piece I'd been working on since high school. At first it was pretty terrible, but after I dissected it using the John Giorno/William Burroughs cut-up technique, suddenly [...] I got results."

The track's waveform clearly shows the alternation between the drone's two components: the languid piano phrase and the sound of the delay line's feedback, which produces something akin to the sound of a distant train. The two parts of the long drone repeat six and five times respectively, always alternating. The piano opens and closes the piece. The track's simple structure (ABABABABABA) reveals the full strength of Basinski's music, a true master at filling spaces with sounds and silences, giving the reverberations time to harmonize with the surrounding environment. The piano keeps repeating the same pattern, slowly sliding into the noise bed that, far from static, varies in intensity, shape and duration.

To be listened to all night long on "infinite repeat" mode.

Over twelve years after Aurora Liminalis, William Basinski and Richard Chartier once again cross sounds and visions with the release of Aurora Terminalis.

A cybernetically restless opening (with the mix literally drowned inside a cavernous reverb) is followed by a contemplative drift that stretches out placidly, though not entirely free of murky hidden resonances. We're only a few minutes in, yet it's impossible not to notice the debt the two artists owe to the German electronic school. The overflowing white-noise production stands as an ideal watershed between past and present, embellished by stimulating technical choices, such as the intriguing use of panning and a mix that stretches the slow slide between different sonic textures well beyond measure.

Gradually, a creeping sense of anguish weaves into the initial stasis. It could be read as a depiction of the end of everything, seen from different perspectives: brutal and sudden in the opening, slow and inexorable as it proceeds. The melodic writing, spare and dreamlike, aspires to the lyrical abandon of Arvo Pärt's "Silentium". The problem lies in how the running time is stretched to excess: the intriguing opening dichotomy (not especially innovative but still quite evocative) is completely lost by the twentieth minute, as we keep waiting for a change of scenery that starts to feel almost hopeless. A variation finally arrives at the thirty-second minute, timid and restrained, accompanied by ticking analog rhythms that recall the seminal experiments of Tangerine Dream and Schulze.

While the overall inspiration is undeniable, we're not entirely convinced there's also an attempt to develop it further. Aurora Terminalis could easily be an album recorded and produced in 1973, and no one would object. One is left wondering, then, about the point of the whole exercise — unless it's meant as an outright homage to the German cosmic couriers, in which case it's a resounding success. In any case, the work is above all a display of technical mastery at the mixing desk: the individual tracks dilute into one another, sliding beneath each other, suggesting the advance of colossal spans of time, a tectonics of the eons of considerable imaginative power.

The latest labor from the Titan Basinski released in 2025 is a nearly sixty-minute "disintegrated" symphony, The Last Symphony Live World Premiere Grey Area San Francisco. Once again, a struggle against the fragility of magnetic tape. A sonic magma that slowly coils in on itself before revealing unprecedented dimensions, like strings in multi-dimensional space. Just before the eight-minute mark, the sound falls into oblivion before finding itself upside down somewhere else, in another era, perhaps in another universe.

The disorientation is fueled by the carousel that starts spinning halfway through the track, a roller coaster marking a point of no return, much like in the masterpieces of David Lynch.

Basinski is the White Rabbit showing Alice the door to another world. The pied piper who enchants the creatures of this reality to carry them off elsewhere. Like Philip K. Dick, he's capable of imagining fantastical places and times that feel real (and chilling).

* Introduction by Giovanni Zangrillo

Contributions by Matteo Meda (“Aurora Liminalis”), Roberto Rizzo (“Nocturnes”), Michele Palozzo (“A Shadow In Time”, “On Time Out Of Time”), Valerio D’Onofrio and Cristiano Orlando (“Lamentations”), Valerio D’Onofrio (“Music For Abandoned Airports: Tegel”), Marmoro Gianfranco (“…On Reflection”), Roberto Mandolini (“September 23rd”), Luca Giuoco (“Aurora Terminalis”)

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