![]() We’re so much alike we’re very connected. But it was such a therapeutic thing for me to do. “No one in the family was in touch with him.” (Basinski says it was more of a self-imposed exile and that he remained close with an aunt in California.) At one point in San Francisco, Basinski says, he wrote a letter to his mother cataloging his hurt, “every humiliation, every heartbreak. “I don’t know when Billy came out, but he was ostracized,” recalls Smart, who today plays bass, collaborates with the Texas chanteuse Chrystabell, and owns the San Antonio music store Robot Monster Guitars. Less than two weeks later, Basinski dropped out of school and flew to San Francisco to be with Elaine. “I walked into Kennedy’s Saloon, and there he was, and that did it,” Elaine says of meeting his life partner for the first time. He returned home in October 1978 to visit friends, not knowing if he would cross paths with that model. ![]() Raised in Dallas, Elaine had recently graduated from North Texas State himself and had decamped to San Francisco to pursue an art career. “I didn’t know who he was, but I kind of knew what he was,” Elaine says over the phone. When Weyrauch visited his friend James Elaine in San Francisco a few months later, he shared the photo of Basinski, and Elaine was smitten. But more than the curriculum, Basinski fondly remembers Denton’s heyday as a countercultural hotbed, with “acid on the street, mushrooms in the fields.” His classmate David Weyrauch had Basinski model for some photographs clad in an Air Force flight suit and mirrored aviator sunglasses, his coif reminiscent of Bowie’s in the 1976 Nicolas Roeg film The Man Who Fell to Earth. In one course, Basinski learned about composer John Cage and mindful listening: to the birds, the cicadas, the distant highway. “Mother and I had issues which were hard on me,” he admits.Īfter high school, Basinski studied music composition at North Texas State (now the University of North Texas). But even in a musical household, according to Smart, “Billy was the black sheep of the family.” I ask Basinski if he clashed with his parents, and the normally effusive artist falls silent for a full minute before responding. “I definitely had that experience.” Basinski found some solace in music, playing saxophone and clarinet as a student at Richardson High School. “You could have the experience of some redneck grabbing you by the hair and yanking you around,” Mark says. Basinski’s Catholic upbringing is evident when he credits Saint Cecilia with finding him his house, a mid-century classic designed by postwar architect Edward Fickett.īasinski bristled against the repressive mores of his social environment. He’s well put together, in a half-buttoned white shirt and skinny black jeans, with silver rings on his fingers and his dirty-blond hair in a loose ponytail, and he’s quickly working through a pack of American Spirits. “I wanted to be a rock star since David Bowie happened,” Basinski says, sitting poolside at his home in Los Angeles, where he’s lived since 2008. It wasn’t the first time he found that trauma and creation are often bound together. Before 9/11 he had spent decades fruitlessly trying to get people to listen to his music after 9/11 he became a star of the avant-garde. With the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 drawing near, Basinski will (COVID precautions permitting) perform concerts across the country to revisit the work-and the national tragedy-that changed his life. A one-hour excerpt of TDL set to Basinski’s film footage was added to the collection of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. The five-hour work, which has been named one of the greatest ambient albums of all time, has been arranged for symphonic instruments and performed by an orchestra at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. TDL, made up of brief samples of old Muzak recordings playing on loop and decomposing (literally) with each repetition, is hypnotizing and evocative, an unlikely masterpiece. ![]() He didn’t know it yet, but TDL would come to be regarded as one of the most important works associated with 9/11-and would transform him from an obscure musician into one of the most revered experimental composers of the young century. While most watched the horror unfold on television, the Texas-born musician and composer witnessed and filmed the devastation from the rooftop of his Brooklyn loft, while, in the background, his speakers blared his newest work, The Disintegration Loops, which he’d finished the month before. But for Basinski, that day bears further significance. Like millions of Americans, William Basinski was shattered by the events of September 11, 2001. ![]()
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