SVILOVA | WILLIAM BASINSKI DISINTEGRATION LOOP 1.1 WILLIAM BASINSKI JUNE 18–JULY 31, 2014 www.svilova.org 1 SVILOVA | WILLIAM BASINSKI SCALE BE THY KING: THE BLACK Mirror OF William Basinski By David Keenan 1. Scalle Bee Thie Kynge. There is a magical idea, rarely articulated, that imagination is the world-creating matrix of desire, in other words that imagination is what translates a sensation into a thought. Disintegration Loops, still the central, emblematic work of the artist and composer William Basinski, conflates the biological with the constructed, the historical with the personal, by a creative act of imagination that would attempt to mimic the function of memory via accidental processes of auto-forgetting while connecting it with historical trauma –the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers as a head wound – and romantic portraiture, through the back cover recreation of Henry Wallis’s 1856 painting, The Death Of Chatterton, with Basinski posed as the dead 18th Century English poet, who poisoned himself in 1770, aged 17. Thomas Chatterton’s reputation as a forger of mystical poetry is of note here. From the age of 12 onwards he produced a run of strange, visionary verse that he claimed was the work of a 15th century monk of his own invention, Thomas Rowley. Indeed, a particular adjective, “Rowliean”, has been coined to describe the works of this historical figment, this shade birthed of an intoxicated imagination. Rowley’s verse is difficult, its language being largely derived from Chatterton’s study of the English philologist John Kersey’s Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, “comprehending a brief explication of all sorts of difficult words”. The poems read like spirit broadcasts, or more properly, missives from disincarnate entities whose understanding of language is simultaneously hyper- advanced and impossibly archaic. In parts they read like what passed between the 16th century magicians John Dee and Edward Kelley and some spirits as they received transmissions in the original Enochian language from hierarchies of angels and demons. 2 SVILOVA | WILLIAM BASINSKI Indeed, Chatterton extrapolated his own romantic spiritual hierarchy, with Rowley’s work being supported and enabled by a superior courtesy of his equally imaginary patron, William Canynge. And while Dee and Kelley’s demons were careful to communicate in a language that was relayed backwards in order not to activate the very word of god, Chatterton’s own transmissions were put together from fragments, a word here, a phrase there, so much so that his final work, found in pieces at the scene of his death, is notable not just for the intensity of a language that seems to exist in a continuum of its own creation and that feels birthed from the deepest wells of desire, but for the gaps in the texts, the missing fragments and the presence of historically occluded blocks of lines and phrases. The final four lines of Rowley’s work, written in the hand of Chatterton, read: “.......................................scalle bee thie Kynge! .......................................a. ...........................................omme the kiste ................................................................” 2. To Fall Like Cherry Blossoms While transferring and archiving a cache of analogue tape-loops he had first worked on in 1982, William Basinski stumbled across a forgotten suite of recordings that he had intended to use as source material for his on-going Shortwave Music series but that he had ultimately rejected on the grounds that they seemed “too beautiful and too pure” to be drowned in electromagnetic signal. On re-discovering them he fell into a reverie, this spectral, fragmentary music of his youth, the ghostly brass, the slow surges of strings conjuring the feel of wide-open American space, of continental scale. As he cued the tapes in order to back them up digitally something went wrong. Due to their age and the general unreliability of magnetic tape, the loops began to disintegrate. Particles of iron oxide fell like cherry blossoms, leaving strange erasures, gaps, sudden swells of silence. “It was very emotional for me, and mystical as well,” Basinski writes in the sleeve notes. “Tied up in these memories were my youth, my paradise lost, the American pastoral landscape, all dying gently, gracefully, beautifully.” Basinski had somehow captured the last gasps of his own music, the sound of his own past fading into the future. As the tape wore on, the music became less familiar, an echo of itself, as everything but the most inchoate suggestion of melody and rhythm was obliterated altogether. When it was over, with only a few stray chords left clinging to life, all of his work had literally turned to dust. Yet the process was intact, the disintegration captured, beginning and end interwoven. 3. The Star, The Ace Of Cups and The Gift “The figure of the goddess is shown in manifestation, that is, not as the surrounding space of heaven, shown in Atu XX, where she is the pure philosophical idea continuous and omniform. In this card she is definitely personified as a human-seeming figure; she is represented as bearing two cups, one golden, held high above her head, from which she pours water upon it... From the 3 SVILOVA | WILLIAM BASINSKI golden cup she pours this ethereal water, which is also milk and oil and blood, upon her own head, indicating the eternal renewal of the categories, the inexhaustible possibilities of existence. The left hand, lowered, holds a silver cup, from which also she pours the immortal liquor of her life. (This liquor is the Amrita of the Indian philosophers, the Nepenthe and Ambrosia of the Greeks, the Alkahest and Universal Medicine of the Alchemists, the Blood of the Grail; or, rather, the nectar which is the mother of that blood.) She pours it upon the junction of land and water. The water is the water of the great Sea of Binah; in the manifestation of Nuith on a lower plane, she is the Great Mother. For the Great Sea is upon the shore of the fertile earth, as represented by the roses in the right hand corner of the picture.” – The Master Therion, The Book Of Thoth. “...root forces may be understood on one level as desire underlying the elements coming into being. After all, basic urges can serve as an important means that the magician can use to extend awareness from the lower mundane spheres to the outer realms beyond the abyss of reason. So it is quite possible that root forces of the elements may be more accurately described as root desires of the elements attempting to achieve fruition and that the inner drives and urges of the magician to create new things mirror these root elements’ drive. Moreover, these urges demonstrate a perpetual drive toward the manifestation of alterity and diversity in the universe. The cabalistic notion of the Zim Zum suggests an initial gnosis of the prime duality. This process is itself timeless and always about to occur as an eternal emergence into being. The Australian Aborigines have referred to this most poignantly as Yorro Yorro. (Clearly, the repetition is connotative of this continual activity of “everything standing up alive brand new.”)... The illuminated initiate’s striving to unite with the One that is All is thus the path leading to Naught. The force of the embr(yoni)c water element is very much the beginning and the end.” – Robert Podgurski, The Sacred Alignments & Dark Side Of Sigils. “The accumulation technique hadn’t been invented yet and it got invented during this session. I was asking the engineer, describing to him the kind of sound I had worked with in Mescaline Mix. I wanted this kind of long, repeated loop and I said, ‘can you create something like that?’ He got it by stringing the tape between two tape recorders and feeding the signal from the second machine back to the first to recycle along with the new incoming signals. By varying the intensity of the feedback you could form the sound either into a single image without any delay or increase the intensity until it became a dense chaotic kind of sound. I enjoy the interplay between the two extremes. This engineer was the first to create this technique that I know of, this began my obsession with time-lag accumulation feedback. It took me quite a while before I could afford to buy two good tape recorders to run this process in my own studio.” – Terry Riley. 4. The Mirror Memory and minimalism are all tied up. We exist with a constantly accruing series of mental loops as companions and reminders, of who we were, and when, all slowly morphing over time, devouring themselves and giving birth to something else, a life, call it, a fantasy. The loop first appears above the head of The Magician in the Tarot. He wears it as a hat that mirrors the symbol for infinity, the snake of ouroboros, eating its own tale. The loop works by devouring itself, 4 SVILOVA | WILLIAM BASINSKI again and again, so that it is always becoming, always new, even in the gaps that it creates, the spaces it leaves behind. William Basinski woke on the morning of September 11th 2001 in New York to witness the impact of the first plane on the first tower. All the while the newly captured Disintegration Loops played out in the background. For the covers of the four Disintegration Loops CDs he used a series of time-staggered shots of the skyline of Manhattan. On the front of the first instalment, the hand of Chatterton – or is it Rowley, is it Basinski? – can be seen in the sky, above the smoking ruins. Memories are scraps salvaged from the work of a lifetime.