BRATTLEBORO — On Saturday, Sept. 17, the ambient musician William Basinski will play pieces from his 2019 album On Time Out of Time at the multimedia arts venue Epsilon Spires. Opening for Basinski will be minimalist composer, John Also Bennett, who will perform work from his forthcoming album Out There in the Middle of Nowhere.
Bennett conceived of the music he will play at Epsilon Spires while he was camping at the Badlands National Park in South Dakota. “This album primarily uses lap steel guitar and oscillators, played in an extremely minimal way,” says Bennett. “I'll also include a piece or two in the vein of my last album, Music for Save Rooms, which was an exploration of stasis music meant to color the atmosphere of virtual–or real–safe rooms, using bass flute and synthesizer.”
Basinski, who is a classically trained clarinetist, studied jazz saxophone and composition at the University of North Texas before he began experimenting with electronic music.
Inspired by musicians such as Brian Eno and Steve Reich, Basinski started using reel-to-reel tape decks and shortwave radios in the early 1980s to create loops of recorded sound that he layered into abstract compositions. This method became his signature musical style, which is still at the core of his practice.
In 2002, Basinski released the first of four discs in The Disintegration Loops series, in which he captures the physical deterioration of the tape loops he created earlier in his career while he was trying to transfer them to a digital format.
The Disintegration Loops series received international critical acclaim and was chosen as one of the top 50 albums of 2004 by Pitchfork Media, and the deluxe LP reissue was given a perfect score of 10 and awarded Best Reissue of the Year by Pitchfork in 2012.
Basinski has toured extensively throughout the world, as well as collaborated on installations and films that have been exhibited internationally in festivals and museums.
Orchestral transcriptions of The Disintegration Loops have been performed at venues such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; Queen Elizabeth Hall in London; the La Batie Festival in Geneva, Switzerland; and by the Chicago Philharmonic as part of Pitchfork's Midwinter Festival.
Doors open for the show at 8 p.m., and the performance will begin shortly after 8:30. In order to avoid disrupting the program, audience members are advised to arrive within that window of time to enjoy a refreshment, view the Kristoffer Ørum exhibit “Mundane Monsters” in the gallery of Epsilon Spires, and choose their seats.
Tickets for the event are $25 and can be purchased at epsilonspires.org.