William Basinski: “My Work Had to Disintegrate in Front of My Face Before It Could Be Really Appreciated"

William Basinski

Elysium, Sunday 15, 5-9pm
Billed with: Robert Aiki, Aubrey Lowe

"That's what makes The Disintegration Loops special," pinpointed Luke Winkie in the Chronicle a decade ago now. "It's a blatant aesthetic with an obvious metaphor. We're listening to disappearing compositions – sun-kissed music slowly dimming, diminishing, decomposing, slipping out of matter. It makes us think of death, life, and our reconciliation to our guaranteed disintegration."

Twenty years ago, William Basinski's sonic capture stopped sound itself. Eighties Muzak that literally disappeared on a tape machine during digitization, The Disintegration Loops became a requiem for 9/11 when the Houston-born aural archivist broadcast them from atop the Brooklyn abode evicting him that very day. Two decades of experimental "obscurity" vanished alongside the twin towers.

"I mean, let's face it," shrugged Basinski last week on Google Chat, his own visage degenerating onscreen somewhere between an ATX rainstorm and sketchy L.A. connectivity. "It saved my life and made my career. So my work had to disintegrate in front of my face before it could be really appreciated in the way it has been, which has been such a blessing."

Initially, the 63-year-old Texan strikes similar to fellow Lone Star John Cameron Mitchell of Hedwig & the Angry Inch fame: too big for small minds.

"I didn't know he was from Texas," says Basinski. "I mean, I had to get out of there, because I was too flamboyant [laughs], so when I was 20, I left Denton and moved to San Francisco to be with Jamie."

Life partner and painter James Elaine counts also as a Texpatriate, with whom Basinski encored music at the University of North Texas – absorbing auditory explorers like John Cage and Steve Reich – with a postgradlike immersion into his partner's vinyl stream via a record store gig in Berkeley: "Fripp & Eno, Conrad Schnitzler, Conny Plank." Urbanity also rose to meet them.

"You want to listen to some really tripped-out cityscape, in San Francisco there's fog horns and what we called grasshopper legs on the buses [connected to overhead cables] clicking and the cable cars creaking," he waves. "Fabulous."

Son of musicians, one of them a NASA scientist – "My dad was a mathematician and mathematical engineer, so I got that gene" – and one of five children who all play music, Basinski launched in Space City and ultimately landed somewhere on The Dark Side of the Moon.

"Funny you mentioned Pink Floyd, because in San Francisco when I was first doing this weird drony shit, people would come over to our little storefront home in the lower Fillmore and, 'Oh, Pink Floyd,' was all they could come up with, because most people didn't know all the artists and all the weird music we knew. Every year, there's 18-year-old geeks trying to find the weirdest shit out there, and now that's me."