In these moments, I crave an anchor. To be held still. To be moored. And in these moments, music has been known to provide this. And then the music of William Basinski gives me something more. His music has always been, to me, the slow drone of a submarine – gently submerging me underwater, removing me from surface-level life, moving me along with purpose. It’s not a dive or a surge, but a slow, steady, purposeful pull. No need to think. Nothing to process. Just to move and be moved.

Tonight, my ship is coming in. William has come to Lisbon.

The wait in the hall at The Rectory in Campolide is a sensory light bath, draped in shades of pink and purple. The setup on stage is simple: a laptop ceremoniously brought and placed by a solitary sound technician. Seats fill and murmurs swell as we wait. A side door opens, and I catch a glimpse of a lean figure clad in black crdaling a wine glass. A minute later, William Basinski walks out.

It’s the third time I’ve seen a Basinski performance. Previous times have been both dramatic and glamorous. The simplicity of this show strikes me as different. No elaborate theatre, no lying on the floor on cushions with the lights off, no couture, no sequins. It turns out his flight was delayed and his luggage was lost, so it feels like we’re getting him in his rawest form.

The sound starts and we sink in. A cloak of comforting heaviness begins to wrap around us as a long drone transcends out of the system, pouring into the room. A hypnotic visual behind the stage projects what looks like a spinning top merging with a water droplet, for those who don’t relent and close their eyes. I’m close to that point when suddenly there’s a stop. Basinski cuts

the music. It’s not right, not like it should be, and everything has to starts again. To make it perfect. The core of his character.

The second time around, there’s anticipation now, having already tasted what’s coming. The sound opens and draws and bends. The first tonal sounds to pierce the introductory drone feel like diving into cold water. To describe the music of the entire performance would only do it a disservice – the single piece is a whole, living, traversing organism in itself, not something to be broken down into parts. The feeling, though, the feeling is like the moment just before you enter a dream. The lightness that comes over the body and head, the whirl of color and uncertainty, the ambivalence as to whether you’re awake or asleep. It’s surrendering to being carried to a different dimension. Wildly different from day-to-day existence, yet ancient and familiar in a collective unconscious way.

In a world that feels increasingly unmoored, Basinski’s drone becomes the anchor I was searching for. Not by providing answers or solutions, but by creating space for all that overwhelming emotion to exist, to settle, to transform. Sometimes the most profound experiences are the ones that resist description, that live in the spaces between words. Tonight, in this simple room with its pink and purple lights, that space felt infinite. 

About On Time Out Of Time

On Time Out Of Time, was birthed as part of a collaboration with scientists and artists Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand who were working on a special project with LIGO. Basinski recalls Evelina and Dmitry approaching him during post-event cocktails at a Caltech event where they asked if he’d provide the music to their latest installation. The artists, renowned in their field for creating sensory immersion environments that merge physics, chemistry and computer science with uncanny philosophical practices, had been working on a Orbihedron, an installation on waveforms for an exhibition on black hole formation.

“I’ve never seen wave forms like this before” says Basinski when I get the opportunity to speak with him a few weeks after the show when he’s back in his L.A residence, luggage and Couture returned. 

“Very wild. Evelina and Dmitry were basically showing how blackholes form and create wormholes. It started with these clicks and some very odd waves. I tried to image them morphing as they moved throughout space time, throughout galaxies, through light years as they came to earth…I’m using synthesisers in my studio and just seeing how it adjusts…And then as it gets to earth, it gets very romantic. So to me the whole piece is like an epic gothic vampire story of two fucking black holes that create a rift in space. One thing that really fascinated me were these clicks, because that’s what they [E+D] had detected. It’s a click, but it’s galactic waves travelling through earth.”

When going into my own wormhole on this, researching up on the project, I came across a clip of an interview where Dmitry Gelfand recites words of the late John Wheeler, the physicist who coined the term ‘Black Hole’, which feels like both a dramatic and non-definitive (in a space time continum sort of way), place to end.

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‘Space can be crumpled like paper into an infinitesimal dot. Time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame. And the laws of physics, which we regard as sacred and immutable, are anything but.” John Archibald Wheeler, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam (2000).

William Basinski upcoming:

For 2025’s Venice Bienale, William Basinski will present a new iteration of The Garden of Brokenness, reimagined as a requiem for three pianos, percussion and vaporetto drone. The world premiere features a transcription by acclaimed pianist Adam Tendler, a close collaborator of Basinski.

‘The Disintegration Loops’ Arcadia Archive Edition box. Out 7th November on Temporary Residence.