Rendering Time (Basinski): an Interview with William Basinski

WB: It has always fascinated me, from the very beginning. The loops of memory, for starters: feedback loops, childhood memories. We remember bad things more than we remember good things, these things that turn into feedback loops, and then you can get caught in a trap. I had to figure out a way through my own bad feedback loops. Through my experimentations with tape loops and the physical nature of working with a piece of plastic, rust, and glue, I was able to reach a point where I was discovering innate melancholy inside muzak, for example. I started getting results, and when I would find the perfect loop, it could just go and you’re, like, suspended there, out of time. These are the kinds of things that I like. Over the years I continued to develop what I wanted to hear. I like turning something on and just falling in, and losing track of time. It’s something I could afford to work with. I couldn’t afford synthesizers, and for 10 dollars I had two tape decks and a bunch of used tapes that I could work with for years. So, that worked well! For me, it’s one that…you don’t hear a beginning or an end, or if you do, it resolves itself into the beginning perfectly, and then it just flows. So, you’re creating a kind of a vortex or a stargate—an escape hatch, if you will. I’m not trying to teach anything. With my work I use loops and drones, my rhythms come from nature: water, wind, cycles. When I get to a point in a piece where I think it’s finished and I’m happy with it, then it’s time to release a record and then to tour. But I find that a 40-minute piece, when it works in a performance situation, can give everybody a little vacation and take everyone out of this crazy…I mean, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, terror, terror, terror, aaaah, endorphins, endorphins—give me a break! Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to do. Just a place of solace, or introspection. I still love using my analog gear. It does something that computers can’t do. I use computers now for other steps. I do have some virtual synths and some other synthesizers, and things that I’ve had since I started. My gear is my tools, it’s what I work with. I was just at Moogfest, in North Carolina, and besides music, it’s a big technology festival, there’s lot of geeks there, buying modules and building synthesizers. They’re looking at all the gear and the new Moog synths, and they let me come in and play around with the new Moog One synthesizer. Very sophisticated. Luckily, there was someone there to help me guide my way through it. These days I have a terrific young engineer, Preston Wendel, who helps me in my studio, so I can, not really learn new tricks, but avail myself to some new things that I like to experiment with and that I’m not going to learn. So, it was fun playing around with this new monster. Yeah, it’s true. But these are things that you discover along the way. Just like when you have trouble in your life and these aren’t things that you like at the time. There are tragedies—“Oh no, I fucked up!”—but these things pass and as you get older you prepare and learn how to deal with it. I enjoy when anomalous things happen early on in a creative process. It sparks something, it’s like, “Oh, there is something, there is a scar, okay, I’m going to have to …