William Basinski

The Clocktower at the Beach (1979)

Genre: MODERN CLASSICAL / AMBIENT

MP3
FLAC
WAV

Boomkat Product Review:

A previously unreleased 42-minute piece recorded by Basinski in San Francisco made from tape loops of broken 1950s TV sets and recordings of night shifts at the factory. Hazed and subtly transcendent, it's one of the best things we've heard from the 'Disintegration Loops' legend in ages.

Way back in 1979 William Basinski was stationed on the notorious Haight Street in San Francisco - it was affordable for artists back then. His partner, the artist James Elaine, would rescue old televisions from the street as families upgraded to more modern color models, and Basinski set about recording their peculiar fuzzy transmissions to reel-to-reel tape. His Norelco Continental deck had four speeds, so Basinski could use the pitch variance to create long, sprawling drone pieces. The final piece of the puzzle was a series of field recordings he made at his night job at a factory, which he combined with the TV static to develop "The Clocktower at the Beach", a mystifying long-form composition that's among the most stunning in Basinski's canon.

For those of you who have only come across 'Disintegration Loops' and its successors, it might come as a surprise to learn that "The Clocktower..." is markedly different. The piece is still durational experiment, but at this point in his development, Basinski was more driven by the material his partner was bringing home from the record store he worked at day-to-day. So it was Eliane Radigue's feedback works and Jean-Claude Eloy's contemplative "Gaku-No-Michi" that provided the inspiration he needed. If you've heard 1997's "Shortwavemusic" (which Basinski recorded not long after this one in 1982) that's possibly the closest stylistically, but even that doesn't quite reach the same level of horizontal, blunted fuzz.

'The Clocktower...' is deceptively simple; Basinski doesn't use many elements but manages to captivate us completely, conuring a mood that's somewhere between 'Eraserhead' and Brian Eno's shimmering "On Land". The gorgeous, heartbreaking melodies are there if you're willing to do the searching, buried beneath layer upon layer of tape hiss, pipe noise and mechanical grot. Hard to believe it's over forty years old.

MP3 Release (3)