William Basinski: The Sound of Repetition as Sound of Change and Decay

Next to John Oswald, we also talked about the composer William Basinski in the frame of American avantgarde music’s approach to appropriation art. In my perception, Basinski extends Oswald’s discussion of musical originality, by adding to it the layer of time elapse and time transcendence. While Oswald’s art deals more with the question of musical ownership, I would describe Basinski’s work in the frame of sound decay – a form of reappropriation of old original recordings, that are on the brink of decay, of vanishing from the world, and can only live on through being recontextualized in Basinski’s art, although crucially, the process of re-recording changes them. After being familiarized with Basinski and his approach to avantgarde music, my mind was blown, as in contemporary times, where music has increasingly developed a fast-paced commodity character and record companies are always on the hunt for the next chartbuster, Basinski sustains the industry’s exact opposite, as he creates hauntingly beautiful music based on the slow process of change and decay. His music is centered on the chatter of his tape player machine, which captures the organic change of old tapes looping and dissolving along the way.

The track “The Disintegration Loops II” does exactly that. It can be described as a tape loop of on old recording of some kind of horns and strings with a vocal-like melody, that winds its way through the tape player and decays continually with the magnetic tape flaking off and ultimately destroying the tape. The ongoing process of destruction is audibly captured, as the melodies slightly, almost imperceptibly change and vanish in this loose repetition process. It is almost like each melody has its own magic, that falls away in its own time span. Basinski hereby achieves to make the timely transcendence of music audible, capturing the life and death of these melodies, the change of sound.

As the New Yorker wrote: “Basinski’s music celebrates the decay of the ideal copy.” It can thereby be understood as a form of sonic meditation on endings, death, and decay. Importantly though, Basinski manages to transform these notions into abyssal beauty, without losing their sense of darkness and grief, and importantly, without losing their musical core. And again, as other musical avantgarde artists before him, he plays on the time-space-continuum through making the inevitable passage of time and the undeniable collapsing of space visible. Basinski excels in this art by somehow retaining the very essence of these sounds and characteristics and, thus, creates a timeless piece in which time and space collectively resonate.

In addition to the transcendence of the audible, the expiration date of original music, this sound of decay correlates with a tragic cultural decay: the day of 9/11, as the completion of the tape loop recordings concurred with the day of 9/11 and the destruction of the World Trade Center. Since Basinski allegedly witnessed and captured this tragedy from the rooftop of his Brooklyn apartment, the artwork’s cover features photographs of the New York City skyline in the aftermath of the Twin Tower’s collapse. As much as the pictures itself capture a landscape of decay, the music can be seen as an elegy to that moment in time.

Altogether, Basinski achieves to extend the debate of music originality in a beautifully, haunting way, capturing the sound of repetition as audible change, and thereby, naturally extending the possibilities of music-making. His music contains the ability to bring the listener to a different space and to a different state of mind after listening to his tape loops. Finally, Basinski’s music can be understood as an analogy to life - the never quite tangible, already past, and yet ongoing life. In reality, as in music.