Copyright The New York Times
When William Basinski heard banging at the door of his Brooklyn loft soon after 9 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, he assumed he was being evicted. A dozen years earlier, the composer and his partner, the painter James Elaine, rented the third floor of the former Hecla Iron Works Factory, turning their 4,000 or so square feet into a creative playground, Arcadia. They built recording and painting studios there, plus an ornate performance space that hosted Anohni and Diamanda Galás. The cover of Jeff Buckley’s “Grace” emerged from a photo shoot inside their Williamsburg utopia. After Elaine moved to Los Angeles to work at the Hammer Museum in 1999, Basinski took on roommates to pay bills. Still, he drowned in debt. As a thunderstorm raged on Sept. 10, he called Elaine and confessed he was contemplating suicide. Elaine talked him down. Basinski slept until the pounding began. “It was my friend who had been out early with his camera: ‘Billy! Billy! The Twin Towers are burning!’” Basinski, 67, said recently in his living room in Los Angeles, lighting one in a succession of American Spirit cigarettes and inhaling until his eyes bulged. He had large Klipsch speakers on the roof, “so I went downstairs and turned on ‘The Disintegration Loops’ very loud.” “We sat there in lawn chairs and listened and watched the end of the world,” he said. Six weeks earlier, Basinski had pulled a few foot-long loops of magnetic tape he’d made in the early ’80s from storage. He had recorded fragments of music broadcast from radio stations transmitting atop the Empire State Building, hoping to mimic the sound of the Mellotron he could not afford. In the decades since, Basinski had learned that such tape could degrade; he not only wanted to digitize his data before it was lost, but also play along with those relics. He put the first loop in his Norelco tape machine, pressed play and added a few French horn-like notes from a bulky old synthesizer. When he glanced at the tape, he saw the iron oxide flaking off, that he was catalyzing the very process he hoped to pre-empt. He let it happen for nearly an hour, then repeated the process with five more loops. “I let the tapes do their thing, because I realized it wasn’t about me,” Basinski said. He lifted the first loop from a deli quart container and, with a turquoise-ringed finger, pointed out how clear the tape was, how much music had vanished. “It was profoundly moving to realize what had just happened. I called all my friends and told them to get over here.” The phenomenon transformed Basinski’s life. “The Disintegration Loops,” the nearly five hours of slowly collapsing sound he self-released in four CD volumes in 2002 and 2003, became a landmark of emotional electronic music, catapulting him into the career that had eluded him for nearly a quarter-century. Last week, the “Loops” were reissued for a second time as a lavish boxed set, a testament to how they have become a cornerstone of new ideas and feelings in ambient and electronic music at large. In 1980, Basinski had followed his heart to New York. He and Elaine met in a saloon with swinging doors at the University of North Texas in 1978. They soon decamped to San Francisco, Elaine trying to muster a painting career as Basinski worked in a factory making sausage-casing clips. Seeking a visual arts community for Elaine, they headed east, finding a 5,000-square Brooklyn foot loft for $800 a month. By day, Basinski worked whatever jobs he could rustle — porn-theater cashier, phone-messaging operator, photography studio manager — so he and Elaine could make art all night. They would tune eight TVs to static and let them blare as they toiled. “Luckily we didn’t know that if you were as cute and stylish and fabulous as we were you could get into Studio 54 for free,” Basinski said with a Texas lilt, his laughter shaking the gold cross hanging across his bare chest, his shirt unbuttoned nearly to the navel. “We didn’t go out because we didn’t have money. What we did was our work.” Elaine remembered a time when Basinski essentially busked with his tape machine on the street, only to come home with maybe $1.75. He played saxophone in bands, even opening for David Bowie once, and staged ambitious conceptual performances; they drew little notice. “I just broke down and cried one day,” Elaine said. “No one recognized his music.” After nearly a decade in their first loft, Elaine and Basinski accepted a $600,000 settlement to relocate so the MetroTech Center could be built in Brooklyn. They used the money to start Arcadia, which was a locus of creative energy through the ’90s. Basinski succeeded as an artistic impresario and a business owner, running a vintage store called Lady Bird. Still, his music never gained much traction. “I was so insecure, but I just kept doing it — worked jobs, came home, did my work, got great results, kept doing it,” he said, sighing. “It was my school of hard knocks.” After Sept. 11, the change was almost instant. In early November 2001, Anohni & the Johnsons used Basinski’s sounds and the footage he’d shot of the burning Twin Towers during a series of Brooklyn shows. “They were playing around Arcadia at 24/7 in those weeks and months,” Anohni said of the loops via text message. “It obviously felt intense to show footage in this context, but it felt appropriate for us.” Anohni had been doling out CD-R versions of the work to anyone who would listen, including the Johnsons violinist Maxim Moston. “People gasped when they saw and heard what this was; it was raw,” Moston remembered in a video interview. “It was a collective moment of recognition and healing, of just being with the event we had all lived through. It became the soundtrack to a lot of people’s lives that fall and winter.” “The Disintegration Loops” have also transcended their original context. The sound of the past collapsing into the present soon became crucial to artists like Burial, the Caretaker and even the guitarist William Tyler, all associated with a spectral mode of sound known as hauntology. And despite its origins, there is a macabre sumptuousness to “The Disintegration Loops.” It is a hypnotic elegy not just for an idealized former version of the United States but also for the glorious possibility of youth. On the first volume’s back cover, Basinski wore a lost expression and lace, his arms open in a way that suggested he was descending into a void. It was his allusion to Henry Wallis’s painting “The Death of Chatterton,” where the teenage English poet Thomas Chatterton looks peaceful following his suicide. “He was a brilliant artist that killed himself before anyone discovered how brilliant he was,” Basinski said. “A fallen angel.” The irony, of course, was that the record led to Basinski’s discovery. He has built a formidable discography in the past 24 years — the broken music-box dream of “Nocturnes,” the sunken-world piano of “Cascade,” the swaddled drones of his David Bowie eulogy, “For David Robert Jones.” Still, “The Disintegration Loops” have colored the career they helped build, the context by which everything else he has done is judged. He has been accused, too, of exploiting tragedy. “I had to do something, and I couldn’t go make sandwiches for the guys downtown,” he said, his voice tense. “I did my work, and it became a requiem.” Does it ever feel, though, like an albatross? “It never has,” he said. “It’s not like I have to outdo it. Even when I had done ‘The Disintegration Loops,’ I thought, ‘What am I going to do with this?’ I was $30,000 in debt. But then all hell broke loose, and I forgot about my worries. Miracles happen. It saved my life.”
