BBB Magazine by Amanda Bean

Issue 01 December 2012

£5.30

BIKINI KILL H O L LY HERNDON WILLIAM BASINSKI ARTHUR RUSSELL X-T G GODSPEED YOU!BL ACK EMPEROR

420029

105400

Oneida A List of the Burning Mountains

2XLP

13 NOVEMBER, 2012

WWW.JAGJAGUWAR.COM

WWW.ROUGHTRADE.COM

BBB magazine

Contents page

03 X-TG

INTERVIEW BY ALEX PETREDIS & PHOTOGRAPHY BY INDUSTRIAL RECORDS

05 ALBUM REVIEWS 12 ARTHUR RUSSELL 14 WILLIAM BASINSKI 22 HOLLY HERNDON 26 ALBUM COVER DESIGN 32 BIKINI KILL 39 FRIDA CLEMENTS REVIEWS OF CURRENT ALBUM, EP & REISSUE RELEASES

INTERVIEW BY DAVID TOOP & PHOTOGRAPHY BY AUDIKA RECORDS

INTERVIEW BY JOHN DORAN & PHOTOGRAPHY BY GARY JORDAN

INTERVIEW BY JENNIFER LUCY ALLEN & PHOTOGRAPHY BY NICK HELDERMAN

WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY BY HARDFORMAT

INTERVIEW BY JESSICA HOPPER & PHOTOGRAPHY BY PAT GRAHAM

INTERVIEW BY JOHN FOSTER & PHOTOGRAPHY BY ELKA KARL

BBB magazine

Editorial

ISSUE 01 . DECEMBER 2012 PUBLISHER & EDITOR IN CHIEF Tony Miles EDITOR Sarah Herman DEPUTY EDITOR Frances Walmsley ART DIRECTION & DESIGN Chris Weaver DESIGN Amanda Bean ADVERTISING MANAGER Samantha Hassall LICENSING MANAGER & ADVERTISING SALES Steve Woolson SUBSCRIPTIONS, CIRCULATION & ACCOUNTS Haley Ropata ARCHIVIST Ray Lebourn WORDS Mark Shukla, Chris Buckle . Skinny, Chris Power . BBC London, Jelone Star . Punknews, Frank Mojica, Paula Mejia, Jeremy Larson . Consequence of Sound, Andy Kellman . AllMusic, Rebecca Taylor, Lynda Munnery, Eric Henry, Lauren Roberston . Boomkat Records, Peter Hvid . Temporary Residence, Alex Petredis . The Guardian, David Toop . The Wire, John Doran . Self Titled Daily, Jennifer Lucy Alllen . The Wire Magazine, Jessica Hopper, Spin Magazine , John Foster . RockPaper Inc. IMAGES Courtesay of Industrial Records, Audika Records, Gary Jordan, Jennifer Lucy Allen, Hardformat, Pat Graham & Elka Karl. CONTACT BBB Magazine 38 Southampton Road London E1 6MN United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 6011

BBB magazine

Issue 01

An interview with

X-TG

X DESERTSHORE/THE FINAL REPORT The complete reworking of Nico’s album Words by Alex Petredis Of all the bands who’ve staged reunions over last decade or so, perhaps the most vexing was that of industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle. The four members’ intention was presumably to see what new artistic paths they might forge together, almost a quarter of a century after they split acrimoniously. And yet reunions are almost unavoidably predicated on nostalgia. Delightful as it was to hear audiences deliriously greeting music as relentlessly negative and unpleasant as Slug Bait or What a Day, the very idea of a reformed TG playing what you might loosely term “the hits” to a rapturous response – or even performing a classic album live in its entirety, as they did on the 30th anniversary of their legendarily punishing debut, The Second Annual Report – seemed somehow at odds with the very essence of Throbbing Gristle, whose frontman Genesis P-Orridge once

claimed: “We try to imagine the audience are already dead and then we don’t have to refer to their wants or desires or feel we’re trying to pander to what they want us to be.” Furthermore, here was a band who set out to be the very antithesis of a rock group – “to burst open the blistered lie rock’n’roll culture was telling about rebellion and transgression”, as the sleevenotes to this two-CD set put it – behaving suspiciously like a rock group. A TG fan troubled by this might have felt reassured by the announcement of the Desertshore project in 2007. Here was an idea only Throbbing Gristle would come up with: a complete reworking of Nico’s fearsome 1971 album, the initial recording sessions for which took place in front of an audience at the ICA. You could never have confused the latter with a gig: the sessions began at noon and went

on for 12 hours, with the band members “bickering, recording, playing back, retaking, wandering about, joking with each other, and drinking cups of tea” rather than engaging with their audience. The initial results were released on a 12-CD box set, but the album project was derailed: first Genesis P-Orridge left TG midway through a European tour, then Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, apparently the driving force behind the project, died unexpectedly in his sleep in November 2010. His bandmates Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti’s decision to finish the album as a tribute to Christopherson, using guest vocalists, has proved controversial, despite the fact that it doesn’t bear Throbbing Gristle’s name – a brief war of words erupted on Twitter with an aggrieved P-Orridge – but listening to it, you are grateful they did. For one thing, the

An interview with

X-TG

choice of source material is inspired: by the early 70s, Nico was a very Throbbing Gristley kind of artist – more indebted to the European avant garde than anything in the rock canon, her vision so bleak and parched and confrontational it virtually defied audiences to enjoy it. In addition, the original Desertshore album is so sparse it allows a lot of room for interpretation: its spaces are filled here by clanking rhythm tracks, droning synthesisers, bursts of fearsome guitar noise and mournful, foghorn-like blasts of brass. It is a resolutely downcast listen, as you might expect given both the grim tenor of Nico’s songs and the circumstances of its creation. The final track, featuring an array of voices – from Mute Records’ founder Daniel Miller to avant-garde artist Vicki Bennett – each bidding Christopherson farewell with the words “meet me on the desertshore” over a backing of spectral piano chords and echoing electronics is incredibly moving. Equally, there is real beauty amid the darkness. The moment when Antony Hegarty’s vocal emerges from the murky noise of Janitor of Lunacy is genuinely spine-tingling: his voice has become a familiar sound, but as with his guest appearance on Hercules and Love Affair’s Blind, a different musical context reminds you what a strange and unique thing it is. Marc Almond’s version of The Falconer, meanwhile, is gorgeous and richly melodic – not adjectives often associated with the oeuvre of Throbbing Gristle, but ones that equally apply to My Only Child, sung by Tutti. While Almond approaches his song in full-on tragic diva mode to considerable effect, Tutti’s voice is plaintive and unadorned, and the song’s melody has an oddly Christmas carol-like quality, the music behind her crashing and booming. Desertshore is paired with a second CD, featuring recordings Carter, Tutti and Christopherson made together under the name X-TG shortly before the latter’s death. They’re the kind of threatening electronic studio improvisations that provide the bedrock of Throbbing Gristle’s original back catalogue. They feel more fresh and potent than anything on TG’s 2006 studio album, Part Two: The Endless Not. It’s as if abandoning the Throbbing Gristle name, and the legendary reputation that went with it, somehow freed the remaining trio to explore at liberty and make music full of intriguing possibilities. That was precisely the point of Throbbing Gristle in the first place: as a result, Desertshore/The Final Report ends up a perfect epitaph, not merely for Peter Christopherson, but for the band whose name isn’t on the cover.

BBB magazine

Issue 01

G A TG fan troubled by this might have felt reassured by the announcement of the Desertshore project in 2007. Here was an idea only Throbbing Gristle would come up with: a complete reworking of Nico’s fearsome 1971 album, the initial recording sessions for which took place in front of an audience at the ICA.

Reviews

7.0

8.5

ALBUM LABEL RELEASE

Brian Eno // Lux Warp 12 November

After two patchy outings on Warp, Lux finds Eno returning to purely ambient pastures with a suite based on a recent gallery installation. A cursory listen reveals striking similarities to his sublime 1985 work, Thursday Afternoon: both are built around reverberant, minimal piano figures, subtle electronic textures and distant drones, and both effortlessly nail Eno’s ambient mission statement of “rewarding attention but not being so strict as to demand it.” Lux, however, is not holographic in the way Thursday Afternoon is – this music swells and peters in deliberate waves; its facets may catch the light in a similar way but there is a more tactile and deliberate agency behind their movement. True, Eno may not be breaking any new ground here but Lux’s patient susurrations remind us that whilst so called ‘ambient music’ has mutated in countless ways during the last quarter of a century, Eno’s singular ability to elicit its most nourishing qualities remains undiminished. Words by Mark Shukla

Albums

ALBUM Lukid // Lonely At The Top LABEL Ninja Tunes RELEASE 22 November Lukid (Luke Blair), like his label boss and sometime production partner Actress, doesn’t limit himself to one style. Instead he prefers to open up the cages and let techno, hip hop, bass and electro crawl all over each other. As methods go it can be messy, but it also throws up some interesting hybrids. Lonely at the Top, Lukid’s fourth album, begins almost apologetically with what sounds like a pitched-down disco edit. The radically different tracks that follow, starting with the broken electro bleeps of Manchester, underline his dedication to disjunction. When he’s operating at the top of his game, this disjunction is to be found not only in the programming, but also in the DNA of the tracks themselves. The single The Dog Can Swim takes the sort of delicate electronica melody that might have garnished something Four Tet-ish in the early 00s, slaps a helmet on its head, and sends it into a battlefield of stamping kicks and thrashing snares. Riquelme, the album’s highlight, clones the puritan minimalism of dub techno and, by injecting the slightest of shuffles into the beat, pushes it towards the abandon of classic New York house. It’s in the more straightforward passages that Lonely at the Top loses its way. From listen to listen, the staggered chords and breathy layers of The Life of the Mind, or the delicate glockenspiel-like patterns of Snow Theme, are as likely to fade into the background as hold your attention. Southpaw’s outro glitters appealingly, but the body of the track is stolid Brainfeeder hip hop. These are well made tracks, but they lack distinctiveness. The same can’t be said of Talk to Strangers, which first sounds reminiscent of The Chemical Brothers’ Surface to Air, then Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, before building towards the eruption of an engorged bass tone. Its combination of vocal snippets and off-kilter snares reference elements of several style without ever being particularly identifiable as one thing or another. Lukid doesn’t command these in-between spaces nearly enough here, but when he does the effect is remarkable. Words by Chris Power

Reviews

Albums

9.0

7.0

ALBUM Sinkane // Mars City Slang LABEL RELEASE 23 October

ALBUM The Evens // The Odd Dischord Records LABEL RELEASE 19 November

Wiping the slate of less distinctive past releases, Sinkane (Sudanese New Yorker Ahmed Abdullahi Gallab) presents MARS as a re-boot debut – a fresh start with a refreshed sound. A multi-instrumentalist of some renown (having previously played with Of Montreal, Caribou and Eleanor Friedberger, amongst others), Gallab’s utilised his connections well, coaxing contributions from a number of peers.

This year saw Ian MacKaye return to music. And while it wasn’t with Fugazi (or Minor Threat…or Embrace…or even the Teen Idles), the Evens’ belated third album The Odds is still a welcome return from one of hardcore’s greatest musicians. It’s also arguably the duo’s best record to date. MacKaye and drummer/vocalist Amy Farina have a weird way of complementing each other, gloriously.

Yeasayer’s Jason Trammell occupies the drum stool for several tracks (with bassist Ira Wolf Tuton joining in for Jeeper Creeper’s rolling space-funk); Ann Arbour afro-beat collective NOMO chip in horns on occasion, with Lovesick’s coda especially vibrant; while a smokin’ guitar solo from George Lewis Jr (aka Twin Shadow) ensures Making Time is a super-slick highlight. But Gallab never allows himself to be shunted out of the spotlight, guiding MARS though a diverse but complementary assortment of genres (the disco-funk of wah-wah workout Runnin’; the title track’s abstract jazz) with skilled self-assurance.

The Evens are still very much the mellowest band for both members, but it’s interesting hearing how they intertwine. If you listen to something like “Sooner or Later,” the guitar part MacKaye plays sounds like it’s a few decibels away from a Fugazi part. It’s stuttering, it’s somewhat indebted to reggae and it has this awesome power. With a little dash of distortion, this would make for a great post-hardcore riff. But Farina hangs back, opting for a half time groove that Fugazi rarely employed, and it creates this amazing push/pull dynamic. Admittedly, the pair use this trick a few times too many (also, while we’re at it, some of the songs don’t really end so much as stop whenever), but the way MacKaye charges ahead while Farina defies the downbeat is something to celebrate.

Words by Chris Buckle

The Odds also packs in some quieter fare, such as “Competing With the Till” and “I Do Myself,” that fits in with what people probably expect from the band, but it’s honestly surprising how effectively the Evens can rock. For all the talk about how MacKaye isn’t so angry anymore, tracks like “Wanted Criminals” find him digging deep for that fabled bark to deliver lines like “Need a job / People need something to do / They’re getting angry.” There’s your Occupy slogan right there. Dischord, and MacKaye himself, have slowed down over the last few years, but when the label and the man pop up again, it’s always worth paying attention. While The Odds seems to have had a short gestation after a long break, it feels like a breakthrough for the group, and a welcome one at that. Words by Jelone Star

BBB magazine

Issue 01

Reviews

6.5

10.0

GY!BE // ‘Allelujah, Don’t Bend! Ascend! ALBUM Constellation Records LABEL RELEASE 15 December

ALBUM U.S. Girls // Gem LABEL Fatcat Records RELEASE 22 October

Although they returned to the live stage in 2010 from a hiatus which began in 2003, this fourth studio album from the Canadian post-rock cyphers nevertheless comes as a surprise, its release – in contrast to the music it contains – silent and unheralded. And it’s a surprise that should please followers of this most exclamatory of bands (in music, as in punctuation). The album consists of just four tracks; available on the vinyl release as separate 7” singles. The longer tracks are re-workings of Albanian and Gamelan, long part of the band’s live set, now recorded for the first time.

Despite the plurality and nationality implied in the name, U.S. Girls is the project of one Meghan Remy, a Toronto native. This double gag of a moniker is only the first way Remy takes what is familiar and expected and then completely eviscerates it. U.S. Girls’ previous releases are noted for their lo-fi equipment and reel-to-reel DIY-ness, an aesthetic adapted out of necessity. Beneath the clatter has always been an ear for catchy hooks, and her latest album, GEM, is a full realization of her bizarro pop vision.

Each piece has its own distinct mood. The mind-blasting Mladic, from which the album risks never quite recovering, is characterised by intensity. From the opening snippets of dialogue, the repeated “With his arms outstretched” could be interpreted as a nod to their Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, its running time allows a gradual layering and build. The increments of speed, volume, tone, and the addition of small details and instrumentation are almost imperceptible at times. But at others the flourish of a whirling dervish guitar fill, or a portentous pause followed by a dramatic reintroduction of the track’s main melodic motif, are marked and breathtaking. We Drifted Like Worried Fire is from the gentler, more melodic end of the post-rock spectrum, its key melody repeated like a mantra, its use of strings emotive, lush and filmic, punctuated with rhythmic paradiddles. The two shorter tracks are the album’s darker moments: Their Helicopters Sing is a hissing, rumbling, disturbing piece, angry sawing violins seeming to attack the surrounding music. Later, Strung Like Lights…wrings eerie ghost-like noises from its instruments, a thick and murky soup developing into what would be describable as white noise were the resulting sounds not so black. By the time it literally fades to nothing it is clear that Godspeed have once again created a challenging, intense, evocative work, worthy of their canon.

Albums

While GEM is the most traditional U.S. Girls release yet, it retains the edge, following the lead of Remy’s recent, chilling cover of Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy Is Mine”. On her rendition of “Down in the Boondocks”, she captures the warmth and romanticism of the ’60s AM classic, while simultaneously bringing a corroded, echoed aspect. Even more enthralling is the cover of Brock Robinson’s “Jack”, on which Remy takes the sweet to sinister conversion the opposite direction. Her adoption of the Jack the Ripper persona comes with an almost pained sense of longing, set against a completely disconcerting piano melody. Besides imagining vintage pop through discordant textures, GEM also offers a warped take on glam rock. If Gary Glitter ever had a second hit, it might have started off with the swaggering stomp of “Slim Baby”, while the harpsichord groove on “Work from Home” could soundtrack a haunted house that goes a little too far. The result of all this reinvention is a brief but unhurried, moody album that brings the hedonistic tendencies of glam and the obsessive undercurrent of Spector’s girl group anthems to light. The last thing we needed in 2012 is another act paying homage to ’60s pop, but when GEM draws from these influences, it’s only to tear them down, reassemble them, and reanimate the remains, the irreducible connector being Remy’s voice. She moves between influences and sounds with great confidence, and Twig’s production values retain just enough of that erstwhile girl in the basement to remind us how far she’s come. Words by Frank Mojica

Words by Jude Clark

Reviews

Albums

9.0

8.0

ALBUM Holly Herndon // Movement RVNG Intl LABEL RELEASE 13 November

ALBUM Andy Stott // Luxury Problems LABEL Modern Love RELEASE 29 October

It’s remarkable when a piece of music causes you to question familiar, unconscious actions — the slight curve of a back against a chair, the shudder of a breath as it leaves the body as an exhale. Even more astounding is when those subtleties are crafted with simply two elements: a laptop and a human voice. For the breathy Holly Herndon, a doctoral student in electronic music studies at Stanford, the laptop is intrinsic to the craft.

Despite being significantly more ambient and less knotty than Andy Stott’s 2011 releases, combined and expanded that December for Passed Me By/We Stay Together, Luxury Problems is nearly as spine-chilling. Its rhythms are fluid more often than coagulated, and there’s an additional human element granted by the voice of opera-trained singer Alison Skidmore.

Inevitably, we’re in an era where an alarming facility to create music, particularly within electronic and dance, exists. Virtually no divide stands in between Ableton and the airwaves anymore; all you need is a laptop and a medium for consumption. Yet it’s the attention to the subliminal effects of electronic music — through creating milieus instead of beats and scenes and synth solos — that displaces Herndon’s complex debut, Movement, out of the ordinary and into a sphere that drastically surpasses any sort of conventional notion of sound. Movement is more of a lucid chronicle of sounds as opposed to what’s expected from the artists working within the increasing sphere of electronica: entertainment. The onset of opener “Terminal” is gradual and tense, while the most beat-driven track, “Fade”, manages to intensely toy with senses ranging from confusion to elation. Herndon’s vocals both chill and burn, oscillating between groans and fades to create space-age soundscapes, most notably with “Control And”. Admittedly, Movement isn’t entirely accessible to a vast, viral audience — particularly through the spine-crawling, postdrowning gasps of “Breathe”. Rather, it’s for the ones who glean satisfaction from simultaneously thinking and dancing. Futuristic and still visceral, even sexual, Movement‘s strength gleans itself from the subtleties. A revolutionary minimalist debut, Movement traces the origin of shadows instead of the light. Words by Paula Mejia

BBB magazine

Issue 01

The sense of intimacy is present from the opening “Numb,” beginning with a looped intonation of “touch,” a fragment of which takes the role of hi-hat before an industrial-sounding thrum something like a mechanical malfunction enters as a four-four beat. It’s dark ambient, industrial techno, and trip-hop all at once. The hard-churning “Sleepless” stomps and grieves with sampled voices volleying distraught phrases: “You left me” (male), “You faked it” (female). The title song possesses a rhythm as sleazy as that of anything by Matias Aguayo or Matthew Dear; the sound of Skidmore’s voice is so hushed and echoed that the words could be taken as a come-on or a warning, with sudden gasps and breaths signifying either anticipation or terror (or both). Toward the end, the album takes a pair of contrasting, thrilling turns. “Up the Box” begins with three minutes of rustling percussion that gradually intensify prior to dissipating into a short sequence of blips and unfurling the deathless “Amen” break in atypically slow motion. Then, on the closing “Leaving,” somewhere between minimal wave and the Cocteau Twins’ Victorialand, strings are reduced to vapour and drift through plangent two-note keyboard riffs and Skidmore’s elegiac vocal. In its own less-alien way, Luxury Problems is just as brilliant as what preceded it. Words by Andy Kellman

Reviews

9.0

7.5

Oneida // A List Of Burning Mountains ALBUM Jagjaguwar LABEL RELEASE 13 November

Pete Swanson // Pro Style ALBUM Type Records LABEL RELEASE 4 October

The success of A List Of The Burning Mountains – the first Oneida record following their 200+ minute musical triptych called Thank Your Parents that spanned three years and three albums – rests squarely on the sticks of drummer Kid Millions. For their 13th LP, Kid Millions functions as the de facto leader of band, who are somewhat of an institution in the experimental/ avant/noise/out scene Brooklyn performance spaces. This is a band whose versatility and evolution transcends simply being coined as “progressive” or “genre-defying”. Oneida are unto themselves a singular musical organism, peerless, and pushing only against themselves to challenge their own status quo.

Stunning 30 minute session of brain-searing noise techno deconstructions from the virulent Pete Swanson. ‘Pro Style’ continues the former Yellow Swan’s work on ‘Man With Potential’ and that mighty 7” for BEB’s Confessions series, re-routing disparate strains of modular synth squall and bludgeoned rhythms into a decaying techno multiverse on the brink of collapse.

And so there’s little in the way of garrulous entertainment or easy entry for Burning Mountains, a frequently harmless, occasionally dangerous, and mostly curious album of oscillating noise drones and arryhytmic, spasmodic drumming. The record’s two tracks, both filling up the side of an LP at about 20 minutes each, are cursorily simple installations into the drone canon. Atop landscape of circulatory synths and charred guitar, Kid Millions chisels away at the drone, attacking it from all sides — blast beats, ride cymbal rolls, raps on the bass drum, shots on the snare. But the synthesizers never break, they just swirl around the drums, mocking their effort, hardly informing what’s happening behind the kit. It’s a distorted reflection of the improvisational aesthetic of their live show — something more abrasive and discordant — but after repeated listens, the push and pull of the band becomes one of the album’s best assets.

Albums

The title track rams grotty, toiling bass hits under a facemauling blast of dissonant, sticky noise calamity, like a dose of sonic bath salts straight to the ear. A VIP mix follows, placing more emphasis on hulking, viscous dub lurch and really allowing the noise to shred through the pain threshold into a zone of cathartic, psychedelic pleasure. He saves his best effort for the flip, as ‘Do You Like Students?’ This track occupies a breathtaking interzone of transcendent Goan bliss and industrially-reinforced, 6am-eternal rhythms, a collective dark fantasy brought to life by a man who’s probably spent very little time on the dance floor, yet knows exactly what he needs it to sound like. Words by Eric Henry

If you looked at the waveform of these two tracks, the incline would be more on the Sunn O))) degree than that of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, but the subtle dynamic shifts and the micro-changes in the two compositions will make Burning Mountains something to revisit, which is much more than you could ever ask from any other 40-minute drum solo. Words by Jeremy D Larson

Reviews

Albums

9.0

10.0

Laurie Spiegel // The Expanding Universe ALBUM Unseen Worlds Records LABEL RELEASE 25 September

William Basinski // Disintegration Loops ALBUM Temporary Residence LABEL RELEASE 19 November

We might be drowning in a sea of re-issues right now (not least ones from long-forgotten synthesizer pioneers) but ever so often something comes along that’s really very special indeed. Laurie Spiegel’s ‘The Expanding Universe’ is hardly a forgotten or lost gem, but this new re-issue is without a doubt one of the finest things we’ve heard (and no doubt will hear) this year.

For a collection of music built around the poignant inevitability of decay, there has been a great many hopeful and inspired words devoted to William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops: stunning, ethereal, majestic, transfixing, life-affirming and for good reason. From its 20-year gestation period to its infamously fateful completion, The Disintegration Loops is one of the most powerful manifestations of the inevitable cycle of life ever committed to tape, even as it documents the inevitable decay of all that is committed to tape. The very passage of time is its most effective instrument.

The album managed to supplant itself in the subconscious of electronic music ever since its release in 1980, and in recent years it has gone from strength to strength forming the building blocks that gave us Emeralds, Oneohtrix Point Never, Rene Hell and so much more. Spiegel’s use of the interactive compositional software GROOVE formed the backbone of her works, and little did she know at the time that the fusion of live and software would become the norm in 2012. That’s enough history though, the extensive liner notes should be able to reveal plenty to satiate that appetite, the fact of the matter is that it’s Spiegel’s music itself that has stood the test of time. Not quite as reckless and ominous as the blippy sci-fi of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop pioneers and far more exact and economical than the oft-compared Terry Riley, Spiegel produced electronic music that was both fun to listen to and incredibly deep. It’s no surprise that Bach is mentioned on the record cover as an influence, as while the tracks are electronically composed and performed there is a clear backbone of traditional classical composition that gives her music the power to get the hairs on the back of your neck standing on end. On top of the original tracks that formed the 1980 release, Unseen Worlds have done an incredible job of scouring the archives to provide a veritable treasure trove of additional material. So often the bundled tracks with reissues are simply a collection of crap demos and live performances, but not so here – there’s almost too much to go through and every single little bit is worthy of as much praise as the original record itself. A breathtaking achievement, and a reissue that should set the bar for others - do we even need to say this is unmissable? So, so good. Words by Lauren Robertson

BBB magazine

Issue 01

To mark the 10-year anniversary of its original release and its forthcoming induction into the 9/11 Memorial Museum this year, Temporary Residence Ltd; is honoured to collaborate with William Basinski in presenting The Disintegration Loops in a fashion truly befitting a library of music with such a lasting legacy. This massive limited-edition box set contains all four historic volumes, plus a pair of stunning live orchestral performances from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the 54th Venice Biennale, both previously unreleased. Remastered from the original recordings and pressed onto 100% virgin vinyl for the first and only time, this exquisite box set also includes all of the remastered recordings on 5 CDs, the extremely rare 63-minute The Disintegration Loops film on DVD, and a 144-page full colour coffee table book featuring rare photos taken during the making of The Disintegration Loops, and liner notes by Basinski, Antony, David Tibet of Current 93, Ronen Givony of the Wordless Music Series, and Michael Shulan, Creative Director of the National September 11 Memorial Museum. The Disintegration Loops has never appeared on vinyl, and will never appear so again outside of this sincerely special, breathtakingly beautiful collection. Words by Peter Hvid

Reviews

7.0

Albums

GODSPEED YOU! BLACK E M P E R O R

Lukid // Lonely At The Top ALBUM Ninja Tunes LABEL RELEASE 22 November

‘ALLELUJAH! DON’T BEND ASCEND

Lukid (Luke Blair), like his label boss and sometime production partner Actress, doesn’t limit himself to one style. Instead he prefers to open up the cages and let techno, hip hop, bass and electro crawl all over each other. As methods go it can be messy, but it also throws up some interesting hybrids.

ALBUM OUT 15 DECEMBER 2012

Lonely at the Top, Lukid’s fourth album, begins almost apologetically with what sounds like a pitched-down disco edit. The radically different tracks that follow, starting with the broken electro bleeps of Manchester, underline his dedication to disjunction. When he’s operating at the top of his game, this disjunction is to be found not only in the programming, but also in the DNA of the tracks themselves. The single The Dog Can Swim takes the sort of delicate electronica melody that might have garnished something Four Tet-ish in the early 00s, slaps a helmet on its head, and sends it into a battlefield of stamping kicks and thrashing snares. Riquelme, the album’s highlight, clones the puritan minimalism of dub techno and, by injecting the slightest of shuffles into the beat, pushes it towards the abandon of classic New York house. It’s in the more straightforward passages that Lonely at the Top loses its way. From listen to listen, the staggered chords and breathy layers of The Life of the Mind, or the delicate glockenspiel-like patterns of Snow Theme, are as likely to fade into the background as hold your attention. Southpaw’s outro glitters appealingly, but the body of the track is stolid Brainfeeder hip hop. These are well made tracks, but they lack distinctiveness. The same can’t be said of Talk to Strangers, which first sounds reminiscent of The Chemical Brothers’ Surface to Air, then Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, before building towards the eruption of an engorged bass tone. Its combination of vocal snippets and off-kilter snares reference elements of several style without ever being particularly identifiable as one thing or another.

CST RECORDS.COM

Lukid doesn’t command these in-between spaces nearly enough here, but when he does the effect is remarkable. Words by Chris Power

An interview with

Arthur Russell

Past

Arthur Russell died in obscurity of AIDS in 1992. Yet this New York composer was a true visionary, traversing dub, disco and minimalism and anticipating the 90s obsession with musical hybrids. Words by David Toop Watching the electronic press kit which accompanies the release on Point Music of Arthur Russell’s Another Thought album, I felt the genuine care devoted to a thorny PR problem: how to sell the music of a true iconoclast who died in obscurity? Philip Glass, David Byrne and Allen Ginsberg discuss, on camera, their relationships with Russell and their views on his importance. Yet here are three thoughtful, creative men who seem to lack any inside knowledge of the world in which Russell placed his art. So they measure his work by degrees of astonishment - Russell loved trashy pop music, he wanted to be a pop star, he moved through genre boundaries with uncommon fluidity. “This ain’t no disco” Byrne once wrote, and Russell interpreted the line as a personal snub. For Arthur, the disco was a legitimate arena for discovery. Symptomatic of an intellectual disdain for disco, the name of the New York DJ Walter Gibbons, a regular and crucial collaborator with Russell, is absent from the Glass, Byrne, Ginsberg trialogue. My first impulse, then, on being asked to write about Arthur and his music, is to offer a latent, parallel view to the well-meaning posthumous image creation that accompanies Another Thought. Some facts: Arthur Russell and Walter Gibbons both died in recent time with little to signal their passing. Alongside the dub masters of Jamaica and disco’s reedit king, Tom Moulton, Gibbons could be described as a pioneer of re-constructive dance mixes. His remixes were raw and daring. When he collaborated with Arthur Russell, each seemed to push the other into impossible corners, jumping rather than gliding, exposing the bones of the music, emphasising physicality and intuitive agility in preference to dance imperatives or financial lures. The singles they made together are unique: “Let’s Go Swimming”, “Schoolbell/Treehouse” and “Go Bang #5” (mixed by Francois Kervorkian) are the three which still sound revolutionary. Russell really improvises on these tracks, playing cello, percussion, keyboards and singing in that high, wistful, amoebic voice of his, while Gibbons chops the flow, treating atmospheres as mobile environments rather than virtual locations. Russell produced a small number of records. Some of them were minimal compositions played by such New York luminaries as Jon Gibson, Rhys Chatham, Garrett List and David Van Tieghem; others were early Garage disco landmarks played by The Ingram Brothers and similar unsung backroom technicians of dance. But those three 12” singles, plus a serene, spacious album from 1986 entitled World Of Echo, alone represented his mercurial talent. Another Thought has been compiled from a stockpile of uncompleted tapes. The songs reveal a move towards music that may have been more easily grasped by a wider public, but perhaps this is illusory, since the album sounds

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like unfinished work. Arthur struggled against time and the awful power of AIDS. Where he might have taken his music is unguessable. I interviewed him once, by telephone, for The Face. Speaking with a halting, nervous delivery, Arthur began by telling me that he had studied Indian classical music at the Ali Akbar Khan school in San Francisco. “Cello is Ali Akbar Khan’s favourite instrument,” he said. Talk turned to a Russell composition called Instrumentals, started in 1973. “I spent most of my time working on that one piece,” he told me. “If it was performed completely it would be 48 hours long. So I had decided that I was going to do that for the rest of my life. When you’re a composer and you just do the same piece over and over, people get tired of it – ‘I heard that one already, I don’t have to go again’.” So what happened to this single-minded devotion? He laughed: “I went to a disco one night. It made a big impression on me.” Which one? “Gallery. Nicky Siano was the DJ. He was one of the first. I had made a tape with Nicky Siano, eventually called “Kiss Me Again”, and Steve D’Aquisto had somehow acquired a tape of that. He liked it a lot.” Russell went on to record with D’Aquisto on “Is It All Over My Face”. Then he met Walter Gibbons at West End Records. I asked if he saw the dance mixes as extensions of compositions he might perform at The Kitchen, the NYC performance art space. “Unfortunately yeah, I do,” he responded. “It tends to scare off record companies. The first Instrumentals piece had drums and I remember I had set the drum kit up at The Kitchen. A lot of people turned off. They thought that was a sign of some new unsophistication – a sign of increasing commercialisation. Then if you try and do something different in dance music, you just get branded as an eccentric. Maybe I am an eccentric, I don’t know, but it’s basically a very simple idea.” He spoke with regret concealed by laughter of “a damaging conflict between me and the record business”, and then continued with this theme of drums: “I like music with no drums, too, partly, I guess, from listening to drums so much. When you hear something with no drums it seems very exciting. I always thought that music with no drums is successive to music with drums. New music with no drums is like this future where they don’t have drums any more. In outer space you can’t take your drums – you take your mind.” That future has arrived, and Arthur had the vision to foresee many of its aspects. “A lot of DJs take the tapes I make and try to make them into something more ordinary,” he concluded. “”Let’s Go Swimming” was supposed to be a futuristic summer record. Some DJs said that nobody would ever play that. I think eventually that kind of thing will be commonplace.” Common perhaps; commonplace never.

“I like music with no drums, too, partly, I guess, from listening to drums so much. When you hear something with no drums it seems very exciting. I always thought that music with no drums is successive to music with drums. New music with no drums is like this future where they don’t have drums any more. In outer space you can’t take your drums – you take your mind.”

Futurist A tribute article

Originally published April 1995

An interview with

William Basinski

TIME BECOMES A LOOP An interview with William Basinsksi Words by John Doran

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m talking to him about the tenth anniversary of The Disintegration Loops albums which have just been reissued together as a box set. The tracks were created from pre-existing loops as they were transferred to digital masters, made unique by the way the magnetic tape crumbled slowly away, causing unexpectedly beautiful and affecting progressions in the music.

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The instrumental hip hop track 'Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel' features a scratched in sample from The Hellers song 'Life Story', during which the narrator is reluctantly persuaded to relate his history by a number of children. He has a vain attempt at brushing them off: "I was born in Adams, North Dakota a long time ago, see? And now I'm lucky enough to be here with you." But the nippers won't fall for his ruse and they demand to know "what happened in between" and, "What else happened?!" And this little audio snippet runs through my mind when I speak on the phone to musician William Basinski. You get the impression that perhaps he's been asked to repeat certain key bits of his story recently more times than he's completely comfortable with. I'm talking to him about the tenth anniversary of The Disintegration Loops albums which have just been reissued together as a box set. The tracks were created from pre-existing loops as they were transferred to digital masters, made unique by the way the magnetic tape crumbled slowly away, causing unexpectedly beautiful and affecting progressions in the music. These new recordings were first created in Brooklyn the day before the attacks on the World Trade Centre and since then, for reasons that are relatively obvious after one listens to them, they have become considered by many to be one of the most pre-eminent American artistic statements of the 21st Century so far. Basinski sighs when he gets to this bit of the story though and charges through it in the most descriptively Spartan way possible. "On September 10, 2001 I was ready to slash my wrists. I'd had it, I was out of work, I was about to be evicted and then The Disintegration Loops descended from the sky and I didn't know what I was going to do with them. But when I woke up in the morning the towers had been struck and the whole world changedâ&#x20AC;Ś" He stops talking signalling that he's ready to move onto the next bit of the interview.

An interview with

It's not that it isn't a pleasure speaking to him. He's a generous man and our allotted half an hour rapidly spills over into two hours on the phone and when his mobile battery dies he goes back home to call me from his land–line. In fact he's a warm and funny raconteur and in a lot of ways it's actually more intriguing hearing about the bohemian lifestyle of struggling artists with big ideas he and his boyfriend James Elaine have lived out in San Francisco and New York over the last thirty odd years. To be honest I would have happily talked to him all afternoon even if only to find out what some of his slightly juicy sounding asides meant. ("I met Miles Davis in a lift in Tokyo. Now that was an experience…") But perhaps he can sense the angst he's causing me because he eventually sighs: "I'm sorry John, it's just that I've been telling the same story all week…" When he gives me the detailed version, I'm relieved - perhaps overjoyed even - because his is such a great story. Avant garde music may not be for everyone but in some cases – this one in particular - it could and should be. This is not a reflection on the perceived simplicity of this music or the wilful elitism of other pieces of avant garde art or the general public's ability or willingness to understand or appreciate 'difficult' music, so much as the resonance The Disintegration Loops has, and the universality of the narrative it has accreted. You don't need to be a patron of the arts to 'get' this music, and you don't have to be a New Yorker to feel its emotional impact. Without wanting to spell it out, this is music for anyone who has friends and family – for anyone who has history. This is music that speaks directly to what our lives mean in the early 21st Century. I'm also relieved because I don't need to wheedle like a child: "Yeah, but what happened in between? What else happened?!" What were your musical interests when you were growing up in Houston and were you quite a "normal" child in this regard? William Basinski: My earliest musical epiphany was being allowed to stay up late and watch The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. That caused quite an explosion in all of our brains. From then on there was quite an interest in what those four boys were doing. My older brother was a record buyer. He brought home the music that we would hear. Growing up during the 60s when a new Beatles album came out, there we were on the living room floor… blasting it… taking it in turns to look at the cover. Before mom came in and told us to turn it down! Later my brother became a guitar player and I wanted to become a guitar player too but my dad said, 'Nah, we're going to get you a banjo.' And at the time I didn't think it was a very cool idea and dropped it. My dad worked on the space programme for NASA. So we spent part of my childhood in Houston where he was working on parts for the Apollo Lunar Module. In Texas I was taken to meet with my school's band director. My mother wanted me to go into the choir because she said I had a nice voice, but at that time I was already getting beat up enough, so I did not want to take that. She took me to meet the band director and he was very nice and he saw something in me. He said, 'I see you as a clarinettist.' So he gave me a clarinet and that's what I ended up becoming… as well as conductor and drum major and the works. I enjoyed the challenge and it gave me something to focus on. Something odd occurred to me today. I've been to Houston before and went there specifically to go to the Rothko Chapel. I didn't know you were from that neighbourhood but that's what I thought of today when I was listening to the Disintegration Loops. Is Houston more of an arty, bohemian place than perhaps people might presume?

William Basinski

WB: I've never seen the Rothko Chapel, believe it or not. But Texas is unique… it's a very special place. I was pretty 'eccentric' in High School and college, and there was a point where I wanted to get out of Texas… before they killed me! Later we moved to Dallas and there the music departments were extraordinary. The teachers were super strong. They had amazing budgets. In Dallas music was almost like [American] football is here, with that degree of funding and energy behind it. My parents moved us to near the best music school in the state, The Richardson High School. It had won awards. The marching band had 300 people in it. There was a symphonic band, a jazz band, an orchestra… We played very difficult music. After that I went to Texas State University, which was a big jazz university and I thought, 'Well, I know how to improvise. This school was known for its jazz bands. In the 70s they won a GRAMMY for its top big band… and they have eight of them. Pat Metheny was in the big band when they won. I wanted to be in that band. I auditioned but really they were full of professional musicians who were taking it easy in this small Texas town, playing jazz, smoking pot and resting between tours. So I didn't get in any of the bands and that's when I switched to composition. I started to think, 'How do you compose?' Most of the emphasis in that time was still on 12 tone or serial music, and I didn't really have that kind of sound, but I had one great teacher who was teaching a contemporary class and he introduced me to all kinds of great contemporary music. And in particular he inspired me to learn about John Cage. This is what struck me. That gave me freedom to try a lot of different things. Like using tape? WB: This is where I began to experiment with tape. I took a Walkman and put some Sellotape over the erase head and would just randomly record things from the electric piano that I was working on. I got some interesting [things] out of that. And then there came a point where I met my friend James Elaine and he was someone who was a real aficionado, a real collector of records - he had everything - he always worked in record stores and he had come to town to visit. He was like the guru or king of this group of all these crazy artist people on the other side of campus. All the gay people. All the fabulous people. The Rocky Horror crowd. He was living in San Francisco, had come back to visit and they all worshipped him. He took a liking to me. No one really paid attention to what I was doing musically but Jamie wanted to hear my stuff. So I played him this piece and he thought it was extraordinary. He gave me a lot of encouragement in what I was doing, and shortly after that we fell in love. I moved to San Francisco and started listening to all of his records and reading all of his art books and learning about art. How do you look at art; what is art; how do you think about it; how do you let it resonate… not worrying if you don't understand it, but simply letting it resonate. I got a whole masters education from Jamie in San Francisco… in a kind of school of hard knocks style. At that time in 1978, there were two other poles in my listening that interested me. That year I discovered Steve Reich and particularly Music for 18 Musicians. And then when I heard Brian Eno's Music For Airports with that melancholy, and I thought, 'Oh wow, this is… allowed?' So I had something that I thought I could work with and I set about learning how Fripp and Eno used tape machines to create feedback loops. So I thought, 'Okay, I can work with this. There are all these tape machines in junk stores, I can afford this.’

An interview with

William Basinski

And what sort of equipment did you use? WB: I started with these two big old Norelco Continentals that I still like now because they’re very simple: they’re very sturdy, they don’t have any bells and whistles on them. They were called portable but they weighed 50lbs each. They played at four different speeds. They were a precursor to the iPod, in some senses. People could make their own playlists for them. Say if you wanted to have the music go on all evening because a date was coming over - so you didn’t get interrupted by having to turn the record over - you’d put it on the slower speed and then you could put a whole evening’s worth of music on to the tape and it was ready to go. I just started cutting up tape and recording everything. The old refrigerator we had in our place in San Francisco had this amazing sound. The compressors in the freezer had such beautiful overtones. If you taped it and slowed the tape down… Oh my god! And then I rented a piano and prepared the piano and recorded that. I recorded the sounds of San Francisco. Have you ever been there John? I have. It’s my favourite city in the States. WB: The sounds there… I don’t know what it is. The position of the hills, the bay, the fog, the water all around it. The clicking of the electrical lines, the sound of the fog horns, the creaking of the cable car lines… it all makes for an extraordinary listening experience. It was a huge influence on my ears and way of thinking about music and listening. I always wonder about the loneliness people must feel when they’re breaking new ground like this… what did people make of it when you played it to them? Did they know what you were doing… or did you even play it to anyone? WB: No! Well, we had it playing all the time where we lived but no one knew what the hell we were doing! Some people would say, ‘Oh hey, it’s like Pink Floyd man!’ There was a small group of us, James Elaine and my artist buddies, including Roger Justice. He got it. And Jamie got it. But they were painters so they were working in large scale canvasses with layers as well. We were all doing similar work together. We all ended up moving to New York in 1980 because of course you had to go to New York to ‘make it’. So we saved our money and moved to Downtown New York and got this big old 5,000 square foot loft, and just set up the paintings, set up the spaces for us [to live in], set up studios and I set up the tape decks and radio and set about discovering a new landscape in the post-industrial, wild wasteland that was New York in 1980. How many loops did you make in this period? Were you quite productive? WB: It was a very prolific time. We had this big beautiful loft. We had to work shitty jobs, six days a week to pay the rent and afford a little weed, so we weren’t going out. We would come home and we would work. So I was having a ball. As soon as I had some results I wanted to do more, and I could do whatever I wanted because there were no rules. Just cutting up these loops and grouping them on this dead tree I found in a parking lot. I set it up on tube and hung all the loops off it. It looked like a giant brain. There was a big radio station in New York, I think it was CBS. It was big and powerful and it was broadcast from the top of the Empire State Building. They played popular standards but the 101 Strings Orchestra versions. Muzak. The wires running across the loft for my speakers would pick up these transmissions and you could just about hear these strings coming in somewhere over nearly everything we listened to. I loved strings. I loved the Mellotron as well but I couldn’t afford to buy one. I knew essentially that when you pressed a key, it engaged a tape loop of a string sound, so I figured, ‘Maybe I can make my own funky Mellotron.’ That’s kind of what I was trying to do for a while.

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I’d tune the radio in to this station, wait until something really string-y came up, either an introduction or an end or an interlude on one of these muzak numbers and I would grab a bit like a measure. Then I’d slow it down and see what I’d got. And it was really interesting because back then there was no Prozac, there were no anti-depressants, there was muzak and it was everywhere. But when you took a little piece of it and slowed it down, like looking at something under the microscope, this rich well of melancholy was exposed. And that really resonated with me. So I found that these were the kind of textures I was interested in working with, making a tapestry with them, creating cyclic rhythms with them. And the fact that this stuff was leaking out of the airwaves, meant it felt like I was creating something out of nothing. It was one wild, mad experiment. I would set up loops, get them going, put on the tape recorder and let it go for the length of the cassette because if it was going, it captured this eternal moment. Why did you move to Brooklyn? WB: [Our landlords] had been trying to move us for years and eventually they had to settle with us all and we ended up with a big settlement. We found this extraordinary beautiful ruin in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that we went on to rent and restore, and it went on to become this beautiful, legendary, underground venue called Arcadia. You strike me as someone who likes to be completely immersed in art, surrounded by paintings and sound art etc. Was Arcadia an extension of this aesthetic? WB: Yeah it was. By the time we moved to Arcadia, we had a little bit of money to invest in a studio. A real proper studio with MIDI, synthesizers, the whole works. I was working on my projects there. I thought that I had to use my talents for something so I thought I would produce bands there. Arcadia turned out so beautiful that it was clear that we’d have to share it with people, so it just happened that we were turned on to young people doing interesting things. They’d come over and work on a demo and I would put together [concert] programmes. We’d do maybe four in the Winter, four in the Summer, four in the Spring and four in the Fall. They were thematic. And it became sort of like a theatre group in a way, because there was a core group of people who were featured and we’d all help with each other’s records. What was the most exciting thing for you to work on? WB: We had an event one night with Diamanda Galas and she was extraordinary. I think it was in 1991. She… was… fantastic. And she even said to me that she felt like it was the pinnacle of her career. I have a recording of it somewhere. Her manager wouldn’t let us film it which was a shame because we had neighbours upstairs doing three camera live, edited shoots for a period there and it would have been a really nice document but it wasn’t allowed so we couldn’t do that. Antony [Hegarty] was someone that I discovered and encouraged to come and see me, because I wanted him to concentrate on his music and he did and we became very close friends. I helped him with his demo. What was Antony like when you first met him? WB: Oh, he was very much like he is now. Very particular. Very smart. His arrangements that he did on the four track, for someone who is completely self-taught, were very intricate and very sophisticated. So we just hit it off and he was also interested in what I was doing as well. So we encouraged each other. So in ‘96 I had been asked by one of the curators at The Kitchen, a big arts space in New York to do a night and I was working on something I invited Anthony to do something so

The [2,000-year-old Egyptian monument and Met exhibit] Temple of Dendur is beautiful, it is in a new wing with huge ceilings, in a room that maybe measures about 50,000 square foot. It has these huge, frosted glass windows. And that day it was overcast and the light was very muted and when they finished the piece the room was in stunned silence for three minutes and there were children there. It was amazing. And then this plane or motorcycle went by making the same note, the same drone. And I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, what’s going to happen now?’ And then the whole place just erupted into applause.

An interview with William Basinski

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An interview with

William Basinski

he put together the Johnsons. I played clarinet and saxophone in the Johnsons for a couple of years before I started to get too busy.

here. You won’t believe what just happened.’ And then I just spent August thinking about it and thinking about it.

By the 90s did it feel like you were beginning to make a bit of headway. Did it feel like some people were ‘getting’ what you were doing, because at this point you had the fantastic label Raster-Noton finally release some of your earlier work.

Between this first encounter with a decaying loop and the day you’ve already mentioned, September 10, what narrative was being suggested by the music? Were you already aware of the idea of the music suggesting mortality?

WB: Well, no! Not yet John. It took a while longer for that to happen. It was wonderful to meet Carsten Nicolai who was a neighbour at the time. At that time I was beginning to archive this old work because I had recently gotten a CD burner and when Carsten heard some of my loops he was the first person to ask me to release a record. When [Shortwave Music] came out I was thrilled because it was so beautiful. I was really over the moon… but then it just disappeared and nothing happened!

WB: Not really to me. The main theme of it to me was… the most profound thing to me immediately was the redemptive nature of what had just transpired; the fact that the life and death of each of these melodies was captured in another medium and remembered. So that was really the main thought, not so much the mortality. The transfiguration or whatever you want to call it.

What was it in 2001 that made you think, ‘I must look through this box of old loops and transfer them to CD’? WB: There was a room at the back of the loft that we called The Land That Time Forgot, where things got put after they got edited out of the main part of the loft, or where we stored paintings, and paint. Stuff. And I found all these big old cases that had my old work from the 80s in them. I thought I’d lost them, I didn’t know what had happened to them. I knew all about what could happen to old tape, so I knew I had to make sure that each one of these pieces ended up with a new master. So I was hearing all this old work again, and I was kind of blown away by it. It was a job that I needed to do before I lost all this work. It needed to be archived. How long after you started digitizing these loops by leaving them running did you realise what was happening? WB: I put the first loop on and I was blown away by this beautiful, grave, stately melody which I had forgotten. I didn’t remember it at all. Some of them I remembered. They were very distinctive, and we used to listen to them over and over. Sometimes when I was in my Mellotron making project, I would record a loop, slow it down and what I would hear would be so beautiful, so perfect that it could just play forever, it didn’t need anything added to it. But I wanted to be involved with it, because back then there was no context for what I was doing so it was kind of scary. I would think, ‘Is this mine, can I call this my work?’ So those loops tended to get bunched together to one side. So those loops [with nothing added] all turned up together in this one July 2001 session. So I was ready for them at that point. I started tweaking the synthesizer to make a new piece, came up with the random arpeggiated French horn sounding pattern and started recording. I went to get some coffee, came back and realised that… ‘Something’s changing, what the hell is going on?’ I looked at the loop and I could see that there was dust in the tape path, the tape itself is starting to disintegrate. And I thought: ‘Oh. My. God.’ I had to check that it was really recording and it was. So I thought, ‘Oh my God, what’s going to happen?’ Over the period of the hour, that melody just decayed right in front of my ears… and eyes. So I was just… tweaking. I set up the next loop on there and they all came up in the order that they are sequenced on the records. And each of these things did their own thing in their own time. And by the time of the second piece when that started decaying, I remember thinking, ‘This is not about you. You don’t need counter melodies. Keep the recorders going and let’s see what’s going to happen here. You don’t need to add a thing.’ So over a period of six days I did those loops. And I was on the phone burning up the line, calling Antony, calling my other friends, ‘Get over

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So obviously the next day, the interaction that you had with this music altered indelibly after the terrible events of September 11. I was wondering if you can tell me about that day specifically with regards to the music? WB: Well… that day was just… it started off with quite a bang. I woke up and the curtains in my room were drawn. There had been a storm the night before and these very heavy material curtains were swagged from this pole across my window, through which you could see the World Trade Centre when the curtains were open. But you could see a little bit of the sky above this. And I saw a plane flying very low across the sky through this gap above the curtain. It was very strange. I’d never seen anything like that. There was a commotion at the door and it was my friend who was babbling: ‘The two towers are burning. The two towers are burning.’ I said: ‘What?’ And he said: ‘The World Trade Centre is on fire.’ And I said, ‘What?!’ We ran back to my room and pulled the curtains back and the planes had just hit. My first reaction was, ‘How do you put out a fire like that? We’re going to be here for ten years, just looking at these matchsticks.’ And then I went to turn on the TV to see what was happening. It was one of those days, many people have talked about it. The weather was extraordinary. It was a crisp clear, dry Autumn day, almost like blue screen. Then someone shouted, ‘It’s going!’ We ran back to the window and saw the South Tower crack and fall off and we just ran to the roof. Our neighbours were already up there. You could see that people were on rooftops all over Brooklyn. And then we sat there and watched the other tower going down… cascading glass… slow motion… and it was just… God. We couldn’t believe it. We were all in shock. There was no news just people babbling on the radio and idiots babbling on the television. We went downstairs and put on the music. It was like, ‘This is the greatest show on Earth. Armageddon, here we go.’ So I had this massive sound system in there. It was massive and all the windows were open. So I just put [The Disintegration Loops] on while everyone was staring at what was going on. While we tried to work out what the hell was going on. And this went on until ‘Disintegration Loop Four’ came on with its catastrophic decay and my neighbour came shrieking upstairs: ‘Turn that off!’ So we turned it down. Later that day I went out to get cigarettes. I’d just quit smoking and I was hunting through the ashtrays on the floor of Arcadia to see if I could get an old cigarette to smoke. But I thought, ‘No, if the world’s ending I can afford to get a fresh packet of cigarettes.’ So I got a video tape because I knew my friend Peggy was on the roof with her video camera. She showed me how to frame it and we just left it recording and I said I’d pick it up in the morning. So I did and I went back to the studio and put the tape in the player and put ‘Disintegration Loop One’ with it…

An interview with

William Basinski

are some very subtle things that are in the charts that he did. Also the young conductor that we use, Ryan McAdams, is brilliant. And they use charts to stop the piece from becoming redundant. Tiny tempo changes and things like that. Some of the things that Max chose to evoke the bits of crunch left on the tape when all the melody is gone, he had one of the percussionists unspooling and crunching up a roll of cling film and he also had written on the score: “Popcorn on the side of the drum skin” and things like that. It must have been an emotional experience for you to see it performed at the Met [Museum Of Art]?

All of a sudden the world had changed. It had taken on new meaning. As the days and months went by, people just cascaded into their own disintegration loops of fear, terror and anxiety. But also there was a rethinking going on about what had value. There was a lot of compassion in the public sphere amongst New Yorkers. I decided to release the records as an elegy. I would release them myself one at a time because I couldn’t afford to produce a box set and no one knew who I was anyway. It would have been too much but I felt that each one had plenty of music on it. I got the artwork done, which was a still from the video on each. David Keenan is a friend of David Tibet’s and he wrote that wonderful review in The Wire that came out, ten years ago in August, and that just sort of launched it. Then a couple of years later Pitchfork wrote that wonderful review. And then the next day my in box was full of orders… and I didn’t even know what Pitchfork was! So since then I’ve been trying to put out a record or tour every year but I haven’t done anything for two or three years because I’ve been so busy. A lot of art was produced in the wake of September 11, 2001, which is very understandable, but The Disintegration Loops seems to have been taken to heart by a lot of people. How did it become involved with the 9-11 Memorial & Museum? WB: Michael Shulan is a very creative man. He insisted on buying the video for the museum and he was turned on to the piece by his son. He talked him into featuring this piece. The video is so intense but I think that it is the perfect place for it. So we’ve got forward looking neo-classical ensembles like the German group Zeitkratzer doing performances of things like Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music - so it’s not entirely unheard of but it’s still pretty remarkable that you’ve managed to get an orchestral version of The Disintegration Loops arranged for live performances recently. What difficulties did Maxim Moston face preparing this for an orchestra? WB: Max is a genius. I left school to play with tape loops, I never studied orchestration and there are so many technicalities involved in writing for orchestra that you have to know which I don’t know. There

WB: Oh, it was like a dream come true. It just made the hairs on the back of my arms stand on end now just thinking about it! The [2,000-year-old Egyptian monument and Met exhibit] Temple of Dendur is beautiful, it is in a new wing with huge ceilings, in a room that maybe measures about 50,000 square foot. It has these huge, frosted glass windows. And that day it was overcast and the light was very muted and when they finished the piece the room was in stunned silence for three minutes and there were children there. It was amazing. And then this plane or motorcycle went by making the same note, the same drone. And I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, what’s going to happen now?’ And then the whole place just erupted into applause. It was extraordinary. And then the same thing happened at Queen Elizabeth Hall. I think we tried to outdo New York there. It was as if there was an orchestral version of John Cage’s ‘4’33”’ added to the end of it. The silence became something to listen to. The silence was amazing. Now it’s 11 years after you first heard them, do you get anything different from The Disintegration Loops? WB: They still blow my mind in the same way, but I don’t listen to them all that much any more. They’re just organic. They’re from another world. I don’t know… they just do something. They always do. I can just fall into them. And obviously you’ve been doing other things since then. I was wondering if you could tell me about Vivian & Ondine. WB: Yeah, Vivian and Ondine was the last record I put out, and I finished it a couple of summers ago. I was in New York in my studio and I found this little lunch box that I hadn’t checked out yet but it had a bunch of loops in it. I had just talked to my youngest brother in Texas and his wife was pregnant with Vivian. Vivian was overdue and it was Summer in Texas… hot. So when I put on this loop immediately I heard the theme to Vivian And Ondine and I thought, ‘Ok, well maybe we can encourage Vivian to come out.’ I said to them, ‘Well, Vivian is a movie star name, so I think people will have to get used to waiting on her.’ I ended up working with one loop and editing other loops under it, there was about twelve of them I could use as counter melodies, just bringing them up under the threshold and letting them resonate. When I got to the studio, the young sound designer Steven had made these sixteen sound channel hemispherical speakers and hung them all along the ceiling. He was able to pinpoint sound in three dimensional space. And this was much more complicated than anything I’d ever done before so I asked Steven, ‘Can you make it wash around the room like water in a pool?’ He was like, ‘Totally!’ He set his system up to do that and the room sounded like an amniotic pool. The next morning I heard that Vivian was born and her little cousin in Hawaii, Ondine was born. So these two beautiful girls were born and they had such beautiful names it just had to be the name of the piece.

F U T H U M BBB magazine

Issue 01

U R E M A N 25

H O L L Y HERNDON M O V E M E N T

Words by Jennifer Lucy Allen Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a trip straight into the psychological discomfort of the Uncanny Valley: the sound of an android waking from deep robot-sheep sleep.

BBB magazine

Issue 01

An interview with

Holly Herndon wants to speak the language of machines. “The laptop is the most intimate, integrated tool in our lives” says the San Francisco based composer. “It’s this always-there piece of machinery. I want to see what it can do, and how I can push it.” Herndon sees the laptop as integral to who we are, how and where we talk, watch, buy, listen. Rejecting the mystification of technology, she actively engages with her computer by pushing its capabilities via advanced coding. In her master thesis in composition for Mills College, she writes: “In my work, technology in music is not abut replacing my human body; it is abut incorporating my body, and understanding where my unique physical body fits into the complex technical world.” Herndon moved to Berlin when she was just 18 and lived in the city for five years, working around the club scene and playing in a number of groups before heading back to the US to study at Mills. Her first album, Movement, is released on RVNG Intl this month, ad she recently started a doctorate at Stanford University’s Centre for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, where she’ll be learning various coding languages. As well as collaborating with Hieroglyphic Being, she’s also working on projects with Chicago footwork producer, Jlin, Kouhei Matsunaga and Iranian writer Reza Negarestani. Herndon almost exclusively composes with software and the human voice. “Each voice has something unique about it and I’ll try and bring that out,” she says. “Most vocal processing of the female voice happens through male producers - there’s a lot of pitch shifting and reverb and angelic choral effects. That’s fine but it’s really liberating to process my own voice, to make it ugly if I want to make it ugly”. She works on pieces live rather than in a studio, testing sounds and structures as rough cuts in performance and working from there. Unlike many other electronic musicians, she doesn’t avoid performance or hide her working methods. “People will put their laptop under the table and pretend it’s not there,” she says. “That suspends the problem in time, and doesn’t really deal with it. For some people seeing a laptop might be problematic, but only by having a laptop on the table and dealing with it are we going to be able to figure out a solution. One such solution is the voice: “by having and instrument that almost everyone

Holly Herndon

can relate to, that helps bring the human into it. Even though my voice sometimes comes out so mangled it doesn’t even sound human, I think the audience still realises that I’m doing that.” Yet technology is a key part of her compositions’ sonic palette. Vocals are manipulated in a way that’s wholly inorganic; sampled voices are soldered onto a track’s motherboard with fizzing low end frequencies. “Breathe”, from Movement, opens with a sharp, digitally spliced intake of breath. Then silence. The processed exhalation arrives too late to be natural, but is not distorted enough to be entirely inorganic. It’s a trip straight into the psychological discomfort of the Uncanny Valley: the sound of an android waking from deep robot-sheep sleep. A laptop can be used to create music in high fidelity, but it simultaneously lacks the required hardware for playback of the same quality. Herndon’s appreciation of her instrument’s intimate qualities creates a tension with her fondness for high fidelity sound. “It’s a compromise,” she says. It’s annoying that some people are going to listen to my album through their laptop speakers…But I have to let go a little bit and compress it in a way that will work. It would be awesome if everyone’s first experience of the album was a WAV file through a huge system with a subwoofer, but that’s asking a lot. Her collaboration with Hieroglyphic Being brings this tension to the fore. Is Herndon’s hifi at loggerheads with Jamal Moss’s lofi mixdowns?” You can play with lofi sounds in a hi-fi way, “ she replies. “Somebody, I want to say Shed, has a track where there’s a low white noise. He amps it up to create a very hi-fi dynamic, but the sound itself has this growing noise. It’s not the most crisp sound, but it’s happening in a high fidelity environment…I don’t know if I can create the same thing with Jamal, but I can see that there are ways to combine them that’ll make us both happy.” She says she has no interest in looking back or creating homages to music that has come before. “If I’m able to create something with a frequency range this big,” she says, throwing her arms out wide, “I want to use a frequency range that big! I don’t want to limit myself… I would hate it if someone said that my album reminded them of something that came out in the 60s,” she continues, “I have all these tools that have been developed over the last 40 years—why would I make something that could have been made 40 years ago? To me that just seems crazy.”

Words