William Basinski

William Basinski is a Houston-born, Los Angeles-based composer who has spent more than four decades coaxing music out of obsolete machines and aging reel-to-reel tape. His best-known work, The Disintegration Loops, was built from twenty-year-old tape loops that shed a little more of themselves with every pass of the playhead, so the recording documents its own slow erasure. He finished it in New York on the morning of September 11, 2001, and the piece has belonged to that day ever since. Later records reached for stranger source material, including a collaboration with the LIGO observatory built around the sound of two black holes merging 1.3 billion years ago. A classically trained clarinetist and jazz saxophonist, he has also seen his loops transcribed for orchestra and performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he contributed music to Robert Wilson's opera The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic.