(a potential series)
You know William Basinski, right?
Makes music using these twenty-year old tapes he did as a young man in the early Eighties, ambient drones and tape delay system type stuff a la Steve Reich or Eno.
Analogue tapes that have degraded and crumbled, which he reworks and processes but retains the decay,incorporating the passage of time into their aesthetic affect.
Results somewhere between Philip Jeck and The Caretaker.
Most famous being the Disintegration Loops series.
Others have titles like Melancholia, Silent Night, The Garden of Brokenness.
Sombre stuff. Meditative. Threshold of silence. Fading of the light.
That sort of thing.
I don't know if I ever really had a mental image of William Basinski... the impression you'd get from the music would perhaps be this crepuscular figure... possibly wearing a suit and tie... or looking old-timey like Michael Gira or Will Oldham...
I certainly wasn't expecting, when I opened the page of the new Wire to the Invisible Jukebox with Basinski, to see...
It's sort of Peter Wolf of J Geils Band crossed with Rufus Wainright.
Here's another one.
