Los Angeles-based ambient artist William Basinski had the honour of opening the main days of Intonal in Malmö with a performance in the blackbox of Inkonst.
Coming on stage in his west Wicked Witch of the West (read California) drawl, bemoaning our current timeline, Basinski takes us back to the Jurassic era with some righteous T-Rex rumbling. The projection definitely brings to mind rings on the surface of a glass of water.
Like a baby predator, hatching our egg and seeing the world for the first time – we’re basically extinct, yet still we don’t know our full power, our capacity for violence. Mother is busy out there, providing meat for the table. We want to be vegan. Dad was never in the picture. It ain’t easy having tiny arms.
The music eventually mellows out into a big question mark, one that is never allowed to stretch into an exclamation. Just writhing its way back and forth rhythmically like a snake.
Basinski calls it a ‘reset’ but to me it triggers a genetic memory of a primordial ooze. What are we, in this formless mass without bodies, but thoughts inhabited by no one in particular?
What is music if it isn’t felt upon our bodies? Just fluctuating energy – emanating from a source. To control that source, is to direct agency and willpower. If you can will a structure into being, what would yours look like? A flickering incandescence – like the projection on the screen behind him.
Does the structure exist in time, like you or me, or in an instant? We’re so used to music following a formula – the 2:30 of a Phil Spector pop song. Music should be eternal, the eternal Basinski speaks of. But with the death of nature, of life – all of the conditions we are now facing – music may die as well.
The only music the future will know is that of fire and of radiation. The resonance of which will eventually ebb out and die too. No one will remember you. So build what you can while you may. May your structures be vibrant and may they burn intensely, like lava escaping from our core. That’s is what Basinski is telling me this Friday evening at Intonal.
Written on a floor.
William Basinski’s latest release is a collaborative record with Richard Chartier, called Aurora Terminalis.
