William James Basinski

William Basinski is a musician, composer, auteur who
has worked in experimental media for over twenty years in NYC, expanding the boundaries of the aural
landscape. A classically trained clarinetist, he
studied jazz saxophone and composition at North Texas
State University in the late 70’s. In 1978, inspired
by minimalists such as Steve Reich and Brian Eno, he
began developing his own vocabulary using tape loops
and old reel to reel tape decks. He developed his
meditative, melancholy style experimenting with short
looped melodies played against themselves creating
feedback loops. His early studies with piano and
tape, from 1980 –82, Variations: A Movement in Chrome Primitive, will be released in September 2002 for the first time on David Tibet’s London label, Durtro.

In 1982, he began experimenting with pulling sound
from the airwaves. By sampling short melodies from
Muzak radio onto tape loops of varying lengths,
slowing them down, and mixing them together with a
symphony of shortwave radio static in real time, he
created his Shortwave Music series. A selection of
these pieces was released to critical acclaim in 1998
by Carsten Nicolai’s German avant-garde label, Noton.
The culmination of these studies, the 1983 masterwork, The River, a 90-minute "music of the spheres" will be released on Raster-Noton in May 2002. Using current available cheap technology, Basinski created an "instant" 90 minute video for The River, by running the music through the audio-visualizer program, ArKaos that came with his Apple Powerbook, videotaping the animation off the screen and editing in I-movie. This will be shown at Voxxx Galerie in Chemnitz, Germany (home of raster-noton) from May 26-June 17,2002 to launch the release of the 2 CD box set. The River will also be screened at Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg on Wednesday, May 29th, at 7pm.

During the early eighties in NYC, Basinski performed
extensively on the saxophone with tape accompaniment. His ecstatic, earthy and cascading style on the tenor saxophone evokes John Coltrane, Gato Barbieri, the sound of the harmonica, or electric guitar, screeching pterodactyls, runaway freight trains. He performed and created installations throughout NYC, at legendary NY art spaces and venues such as Fashion Moda, Just above Midtown/Downtown, The Franklin Furnace, PS122, PS1, The Mudd Club, Danceteria, Exit Art, Thread Waxing Space, BACA, The World Trade Center Plaza for LMCC. Creative Time sponsored a two-night sold-out performance in 1985 at Art in the Anchorage, entitled Flesh Winter, with a set by James Elaine. In Flesh Winter, Basinski performed on the saxophones as a lonely Pan in a post-apocalyptic world of chaos inhabited only by decaying taxidermied animals, dead trees, broken televisions, smoke, fire and the ominous taped background music evoking a world crashing slowly to an end.

Mr. Basinski lent his formidable saxophone chops to
collaborations with numerous bands in NYC, most
notably a ten-year stint with the thundering,
avant-garde big band Gretchen Langheld Ensemble, later known as House Afire. As a featured soloist with House Afire, he performed at Art on the Beach with TODT, as well as at The Knitting Factory, Town Hall, Lincoln Center, MOMA to name a few notables. House Afire toured Japan in 1990 to sold-out houses of
enthusiastic avant-jazz fans.

In 1989, after moving from downtown Brooklyn to
Williamsburg, Basinski began producing underground
music and performance events at his loft, which became known as Arcadia. For eight years, Basinski curated and produced seasonal series’ of performances and events featuring young talent as well as some NYC
legends such as Diamanda Galas and Shelly Hirsch.
Arcadia quickly became known through word-of-mouth as a Gothic wonderworld where beauty and mystery were allowed to develop, and became one of the cornerstones of Williamsburg’s burgeoning art scene. Soon articles in New York Magazine and The Village Voice were proclaiming Williamsburg as "the New Bohemia". Throughout the Nineties, Basinski performed his work in this environment. His haunting song-cycle, Hymns of Oblivion , with obscure, psychedelic lyrics by
Jennifer Jaffe of TODT, was developed here over
numerous performances to spellbound audiences. Carle
VP Groome likened him to "…a New-Age Sinatra" in
DOWNTOWN Magazine after seeing one such performance. As with much of Basinski’s music, in Arcadia, time stops, shifts, slows down, speeds up, enabling the visitor to experience an internal landscape of emotion, beauty, melancholy, timelessness. Arcadia,
featured in the Winter 2000-1 Nest Magazine, is now
open to the public on weekends as The Arcadia
Collection, a museum of life as art, the latest NYC
roadside attraction, featuring the work of William
Basinski , James Elaine, Roger Justice, Maxine Clement
and other "outsiders".

After a three-year detour in the music industry
producing young bands on a national level, Basinski
retired to Arcadia to pursue his own experiments again
and in 1997 began a three-year performance-art
experiment in "Beautifying America". Always stylish
and with an amazing sense of aesthetics and
decoration, Basinski opened a retail boutique on
Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, called Lady Bird.
Named after the renowned Texas horticulturist, and
with a mission derived from her theme as First Lady,
Basinski opened a trendy boutique selling select
vintage and local designer furniture, housewares and
clothes. A real retail establishment, Basinski
presided over Lady Bird as designer, merchandiser,
window dresser, bookkeeper, as well as stylist, buyer,
DJ and cashier. The windows were a major attraction
in Williamsburg, and the shop was written up in
numerous style, travel and fashion magazines such as
PAPER, Time Out, New York Magazine, Italian Glamour,
Harpers Bazaar, and The New York Times. Lady Bird was again a cornerstone of the revival of Bedford Avenue, and of Williamsburg in general as a destination. Ebay, Antiques Roadshow, the stock market crash of August 2000, skyrocketing rents and general fatigue brought an end to this experiment at the turn of the century. Basinski is currently writing a novel about this experience.

Basinski continued his experimental electronic works
and performed in 1997 at HERE for the Downtown Arts
Festival with his electronica group, Life on Mars, in
collaboration with artists, Howard Schwartsburg and
Karl Francke. Basinski produced a show at The Kitchen
in December 1997 featuring the first performance of
Antony and the Johnson’s Orchestra, in which he
performed, as well as a twenty minute film, Life on
Mars, which he produced with artist James Elaine and
composed the music for. In 1998, Basinski and Elaine
premiered a new short film, Trailer for 1000 Films at
the Kitchen. These two films were featured at the
Galerie Fur Zeitgenossische Kunst, Leipzig in their
New Forms: Contemporary Electronic Music in the
Context of Art series curated by Carsten Nicolai. A
CD documentation of this series was released by the
museum in 2001 on Raster-noton.

In September 2000, Basinski produced a film and
exhibition for Sideshow Gallery entitled, Fountain, in
collaboration with artists James Elaine and Roger
Justice. The mesmerizing 60-minute experimental film
received rave reviews, particularly Daniel Baird’s
essay in The Brooklyn Rail. A 15-minute ambient video
variation, entitled Fountain Sketch was featured in
the LA Freewaves Festival of Experimental Media Arts
at the Geffen Center at MOCA in November 2000, and
received a favorable mention in the LA WEEKLY. In
March 2001 it was shown at Cooper Union in the
exhibition entitled Art as Prayer, curated by Tim
Rollins, James Romaine, and Mako Fujimura. Basinski
and Elaine were invited to show Trailer for 1000 Films
in the 2001 Rotterdam Film Festival, and it was picked
up for the ImageForum festival in Japan, where it was
shown at museums and theaters in Tokyo, Yokohama,
Kyoto and Fukuoka. It was also shown at The
Millennium in NYC in March 2001 in Marco Breuer’s
Marginalia Screening.

Basinski’s last release, Watermusic, was released on
his own label, 2062, in February 2001. A 60-minute,
tranquil, shimmering ambient piece created on the
Voyetra Synthesizer over a period of months spanning
the turn of the century, Watermusic has received
critical acclaim and is available through distributors
in America, Europe and Japan. His new pieces, The
Disintegration Loops, were created in August 2001. In
the process of archiving and digitizing old loops,
Basinski discovered a group of bucolic loops that
began to disintegrate during the recording process.
These pieces seem to portray the life and death of the
American pastoral landscape. . The 6 pieces will be
released on 4 cd’s starting in June 2002. A 63 minute
video with Disintegration Loop 1.1 had its world
premiere at the 2002 Rotterdam International Film
Festival. It consists of one static shot of lower
Manhattan shot from his roof in Brooklyn on the
evening of September 11th, 2001, as that fateful day
turned to night. Basinski has been invited to perform
at the 1st Annual Festival of Experimental,
Electronic and Electroacoustic Music in St.
Petersburg, Russia in the summer of 2003 as part of
the tricentennial celebration. His latest
collaboration with artist, James Elaine, a thirty
minute ambient film study Variations, was previewed at
Tribeca Temporary Gallery in November 2001 and its
world premiere at Rotterdam. These two films are
currently touring the festival circuit.

Title: Disintegration loop 1.1
Show: Chinatown




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