I'd call it "fast", as in: alarmingly out of control, spiraling nowhere but in a righteous hurry to get there. This is life I'm talking about, and it's killing me at the moment. I suppose that's what life does, ultimately, but must it move at so breakneck a pace? The past month has been one of feeling caught up in the flow of people, work, and events just hoping to come out on the other end: Day job's a mess, the train rides are long, my poor wife is being dragged all over the country by her job, there are cats to feed and bills to pay and too much e-mail, and it's all enough to make one quite sleepy, but at the same time too agitated to fall asleep easily.
So. Everybody feels this way now and then, but what the crap does this have to do with William Basinski? Well, everything and nothing. Basinski has really nothing to do with fast or the too-quickness of life and everything to do with the antidote. I'm not even going to skirt around it: Lately, I've been listening to basically nothing but Afrobeat and drone-based ambient music. It's a strange combination, but this month that's what I'm in the mood for. Basinski's records, of course, falls in the latter camp (I've yet to find anything that falls into both camps-- if anyone out there has a tip, drop me a line).
Basinski has his own unique ambient voice. Slowness is the thing with Basinski-- well, not the only thing, but one thing, and an important one-- and as if to drive home the point, his most celebrated work, The Disintegration Loops, took a couple of decades to make. Not by design, mind you, as he had no way of knowing how his stored tapes would decay over time, but it's nice to think about a piece of music incubating before finally being offered to the world at large. But more broadly, his music is unhurried and develops very slowly, rather unlike the information-soaked world it's meant to enrich. His two most recent releases are not things you just listen to in dribs and drabs. You need to actually have a seat and take them in; you need to put aside time to be alone with the music, which is marvelous, I think, because it forces you to realize just how much you're rushing in your daily comings and goings.
Silent Night is the shorter of the two pieces and can be succinctly described as an ambient excursion built of soft, humming drones that swell and recede under and over a hissing, bug-like drone. For an hour. That's all it is, superficially, but there's so much more going on here, manifested in the irregular intervals between swells, the way a rapid succession of hums play off of the drones, and the alternately melancholy and joyous manner in which the sounds recede and return. And the sound. Ooh, such timbres. These are sounds you can really dig into-- rounded, water-smooth sounds with palpable surface tension and mile-thick bass whale calls that seem to have a soul. Unfortunately, the bugs get the last ten or so minutes to themselves, but up 'til then it's magic.
Variations, like The Disintegration Loops, was originally created in 1981, remained unreleased for ages, and involves metamorphosis through reiteration. It sprawls, to say the least, over two discs-- each split courteously into four sections for listening ease-- all made of the same elements: piano loops played against each other in endless variations. The piano recordings aren't laid straight out in front of you, though-- they're coated in a layer of thick, pillowy muffling, which not only takes away the sharpness of the piano's attack, but also makes it sound alien and wombed in from the world. On the first piece, the loops dance around the stereo spectrum in a disorienting ballet; on the second, they build ever outward as more loops are added and echoed and set randomly against each other, creating heaving, oscillating waves of liquid piano.
Basinski's liners refer to the process of setting the loops against each other and multiplying the sound as allowing the sounds to "breed," and that's basically what they do. A short, melodic piano figure is the basis for each piece, and the breeding of the loops makes for moments of both startling beauty and dense, opaque numbness, much more the former than the latter. There's a terrible kind of sadness in these loops as they waver and repeat, clouding themselves over and generating swells of feedback-- the sepia piano tone and the choice of notes play like a hazy memory of loss.
This is part of what separates Basinski from other minimalists and experimental composers. There's an obvious process, even a theory, operating in his work, but it never sounds scientific or cold-- the human element of emotion comes first and is multiplied by the process. As such, Basinski's work has the potential to appeal to many listeners who otherwise wouldn't care to listen to hours of slow, incrementally changing tape loops. And, of course, sometimes the slowness of the music itself can be all the justification needed for setting aside an hour to get outside of our up-to-the-minute existence and really, truly listen.
