William Basinski

William James Basinski (born June 25, 1958) is an American avant-garde composer based in Los Angeles, California. He is also a clarinetist, saxophonist, sound artist, and video artist. Basinski is best known for his four-volume album The Disintegration Loops (2002–2003), constructed from gradually decaying twenty-year-old tapes of his earlier music. Biography Early life William James Basinski was born in 1958 in Houston, Texas. He was raised in a Catholic family, and states that he had his first “really mystical, wonderful, magical” musical experiences as an infant at Houston’s St. Anne Church. he began developing his own vocabulary using tape loops and old reel-to-reel tape decks. He developed his meditative, melancholy style experimenting with short looped melodies played against themselves creating feedback loops. On one occasion, he opened for David Bowie, playing saxophone with rockabilly band The Rockats. In August and September 2001 he set to work on what would become his most recognizable piece, the four-volume album The Disintegration Loops. The recordings were based on old tape loops which had degraded in quality. While attempting to salvage the recordings in a digital fo