William Basinski - A Shadow in Time
Tiny Mix Tapes 80
William Basinski
A Shadow in Time
[Temporary Residence Ltd.; 2017]
Rating: 4/5
For the last sixth months or so, people on the internet have turned their grief over the death of David Bowie into some wild assertions. The half-serious claim is that Bowie was the glue holding together the world’s geopolitical landscape, the universe, and even reality itself. There is some compelling evidence to support this, from the deaths of much-loved musical, literary, and cultural heroes, to instability and war on the international stage (Syria in particular now looks like 1970s Cambodia and 1990s Balkans rolled into one for Millennial news junkies), to the political events that may change Western democratic life as we know it.
A Shadow In Time is experimental process-musician William Basinski’s eulogy to Bowie, and its two tracks contain, quite appropriately, his most blissful (“A Shadow in Time”) and sorrowful (“For David Robert Jones”) work to date. It’s a kind of love letter from Basinski, one of avant-garde music’s greatest pop stars, to Bowie, pop music’s wildest experimental auteur — a study of their shared concern with how to make time, change, and death their own.
Bowie was always looking forward (even as he faced his own death on swansong Blackstar), but Basinski’s work has consistently inverted this impulse by using obsolete technology (old tape decks, analogue tape loops) and exposing pieces of organic sound (pianos, strings, rusty squeezeboxes) to time. The sounds gradually warp and fray, as they emerge, loop, and fade away.
Basinski’s work can be subjected to the same conceit as abstract painting — the (fallacious) notion that it’s difficult even for its admirers to tell the difference between two pieces. Bowie’s music, however, is known precisely for its unknowability — the fact that he never looked nor sounded quite the same in any of the many versions of himself he put on show, even though you can instantly tell who is singing, which song, which record, which version of Bowie it is.
On A Shadow In Time, Basinski tries not merely to locate Bowie’s ghost in the machine, but to find its cross-dressing, orange-haired, anisocoric-eyed soul locked somewhere inside the hard electronic casing of the world. It gives us two variations of Basinski’s mourning, both of which take sudden turns around the six- or seven minute-mark that reshape the whole piece: the breakdown of the sounds on “A Shadow In Time” and the addition of the jarring sounds on “For David Robert Jones.”
The title track is one of the most straightforwardly engrossing pieces Basinski has ever put on record. Its layers of bass tones, ambient synthesizer sound, and distorted high-frequency squealing place it somewhere in between Brian Eno and the work of minimalist microsound producer (and Basinski collaborator) Richard Chartier. With a piece made using ancient synthesizer technology and not tape loops, it feels like the slabs of sound have been placed on top of each other with the aim of producing specific bodily effects — not the vague promise of comfort and well-being that you get in New Age music, but a compromised kind of bliss laced with fear. It’s a version of the sort of anonymous “wallpaper” music Eno always wanted to make, but it’s so richly detailed and so conflicted that it feels less like staring at wallpaper and more like charting all the cracked bits of beautiful plasterwork in a collapsing house. Later in the track, the piece suddenly changes, turning back on itself, collapsing without decaying.
“For David Robert Jones” is quite different. A typical Basinski tape loop, it starts off beautifully, with droughts of choral sounds that lift up and drop suddenly down, but it ends up being one of the most dissonant and conflicted things we’ve heard from him yet. He has sounded melancholic and plaintive before — they may well be the most characteristic emotions associated with a Basinski piece — but he’s never made anything quite like this. There is, as the Gospel of Matthew (2:18) has it, lamentation and weeping and great mourning. And nobody feels any comfort.
It’s as if Basinski is fully addressing, for the first time in his music, the conflicts that come with being wracked with grief. It doesn’t rear its ugly head until six minutes in, and it mourns, gnarled and distorted, despairing in its own ugliness. And that dissonant grinding sound we hear could come from anywhere. A deformed guitar? A withered saxophone? A mangled trumpet? It could be a reference to Bowie’s experiments with synthesizers. It could just as easily be a portion of the triumphant riffing on “Ziggy Stardust” or “Rebel Rebel,” “Sound and Vision” or “Heroes” (which isn’t really so triumphant at all) heard now as never before, as if there was something dreadfully wrong, as if all the fire in the world has been dampened, as if all our best laid plans are ruined, as if all hope is gone. That hope is maintained only by the looping choral figure behind it, but they are never truly in accord with one another.
Drowned In Sound 80
I once read somewhere that the ancient Greeks had two different words for ‘time’. The first was chronos: sequential clock time measured in hours and seconds and minutes, the regulating rhythm of departure boards and microwave ovens and TV schedules. The other was kairos: time experienced and time lived, the wispy spine of memory and nostalgia. You suspect many musicians think their job to be craftsmen of the former, structuring songs to fit into pre-prescribed three-and-a-half minute containers, quantising beats to metronomic precision. William Basinski is master of the latter.
Now a bastion of the experimental scene, Basinski needed time in spades before his work eventually found its footing as the sound of a public unconscious. Only when the material decay of The Disintegration Loops somehow managed to speak more directly to the cultural trauma of 9/11 than any punditry, poetry or prose did ears begin to prick en masse. But this extended gestation seems also to have helped cement a sense of what makes Basinski’s music so inimitably Basinski. It’s music in what musicologist Jonathan D. Kramer called ‘vertical time’: sounds that articulate a kind of timelessness, 'a single present stretched out into an enormous duration, a potentially infinite “now” that nonetheless feels like an instant.' His static-speckled tape loop missives seem so often to be transmitting from outside of our temporal frameworks.
A Shadow in Time is inimitably Basinski, its title a conceptual device that seems to cut through the music from multiple directions. In the most pragmatic sense, it is an acknowledgement of the instruments and artefacts from which this music spills out. The title track, for instance, written on the Voyetra 8, an old Eighties synthesiser pulled from storage, becoming ever more unreliable and unpredictable with age. On the B-side, a tribute to David Bowie titled simply ‘For David Robert Jones’, cut together from ‘these old bits of tape that had been chewed up by my roommate’s cat in New York, this big fat motherfucker.’ Born from a process of sonic archaeology, this music seems to have been found in time capsules rather than written anew.
Nonetheless, that title track works most straightforwardly as description of the music itself—or at least its effects. Relentlessly hazy in structure, in texture, and in tone, the warm earthy drones of that title track are punctuated by distant, muted wails and paralysed synth screams. The eulogy, meanwhile, fuzzy and failing, its tape loops repeated manta-like over and over. Its only structural impasse seems to be the introduction of a saxophone, an old recording of Basinski’s playing, but seemingly deployed to recall Berlin-era Bowie.
Perhaps A Shadow in Time is best embodied by its artwork, an image that captures neither point nor passage in time, but its manipulation, a visual gesture akin to Dali’s clocks. Like scattered others through the annals of music history — Eric Satie, La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros, Brian Eno — Basinski brings to his craft an understanding that music structures time just as much as time structures music. Among his most entrancing work.
Wed Jan 25 10:35:00 GMT 2017Pitchfork 79
In the fifteen years since William Basinski released the debut installment of his Disintegration Loops series he has been rapidly, and rightly, lionized. But for two decades prior to that, he was just another eccentric artist in New York, a tinkerer who built his own instruments, ran a venue and experimented insatiably with tape loops. He would tune in to the easy listening piped out by CBS and record snippets of it, creating a massive archive of schmaltz that, through the alchemy of sampling, could be transfigured into something infinitely more haunting. “I would set up loops, get them going, put on the tape recorder and let it go for the length of the cassette because if it was going, it captured this eternal moment,” he told The Quietus in 2012. That eternal-moment is quintessential Basinski; his work has been uniquely fixated on time and loss, his compositions heaving with longing, melancholy and a sense of impenetrable mystery.
At its best, Basinski’s music inspires the sort of rapturous testimony usually reserved for peak experiences, cult leaders and the dead. When it’s not working as well, it can feel not unlike so-called “ruin porn” or the photography of Edward Burtynsky: lovely aestheticizations of late-capitalist collapse that comfort more than they confront. Thankfully, his new album A Shadow in Time contains some of his strongest work since The Disintegration Loops introduced the world to the artist.
The two pieces on A Shadow in Time offer contrasting entry points into his work. The title track is a richly layered composition for the archaic Voyetra 8 synthesizer that was a year in the making and showcases Basinski at the height of his compositional powers. David Bowie tribute “For David Robert Jones,” on the other hand, is an off-the-cuff tape loop piece commissioned by LA’s Volume gallery in the weeks after the artist’s death. Built with re-purposed tape fragments that had been chewed up by a former roommate's cat (“this big, fat motherfucker,” he called it) “For David” exemplifies the entropic decay he’s most known for while adding specific, Bowie-riffing details.
As with all Basinski’s work, there’s a tantalizing juxtaposition between chance and intention (the Voyetra 8 wasn’t even guaranteed to turn on, and when it did, it “was already doing some weird shit so we used it and more”). But on “A Shadow in Time” this tension plays more of a supporting role than a lead. The piece opens with a slow-motion cascade of shimmering high harmonies and murky, shifting lower tones. In its austere beauty, it calls to mind Pauline Oliveros’ landmark Deep Listening, but with an added dash of dread. Clocking in at just shy of 23 minutes, “Shadow” spends its first half stretching towards infinity and its second collapsing on itself.
Around the seven minute mark (amazingly it only feels like three), the piece begins to hollow out. Gradually those glassy high notes drift away like the dust tail of a comet, and tape hiss overtakes the piece. The sense of deterioration is palpable, made more dramatic by distant synth moans and weird bursts of chirping noise that poke through just as “Shadow” drifts into silence. It’s the kind of ending that makes one feel less like a listener and more like a witness.
In the wake of the A-side’s descent, “For David Robert Jones” feels like a cool down for the audience and a victory lap for Basinski. An orchestral clip that could easily be a Disintegration Loops outtake opens, circling around itself and never quite resolving. We’re on more familiar footing here, and the emotional tenor of the the piece, though engaging, is less arrestingly in-your-face than “Shadow.” Six minutes in, a gnarled saxophone juts through rudely, throwing the chilled out transcendence pleasingly off balance. A nod to Bowie’s own saxophone honking on “Subterraneans,” it’s an amusingly punk bit of sabotage, but it fails to develop into something more. Over fourteen more minutes the tension dissipates and “For David” runs out of steam.
Discussing The Disintegration Loops in 2012, Basinski told the Quietus “Over the period of the hour, that melody just decayed right in front of my ears… and eyes… I remember thinking, 'This is not about you.’” While this sense of riveting discovery isn’t fully achieved on “For David,” the album nonetheless offers a stunning journey into a vast, ink-black void.
Fri Jan 13 06:00:00 GMT 2017